Mosesquine wrote: ↑July 16th, 2018, 5:52 amThere are four kinds of mind-body theories according to Davidson: nomological monism, nomological dualism, anomalous dualism, and anomalous monism. Among them, nomological monism and anomalous monism are so-called reductive physicalism (or type physicalism) and non-reductive physicalism (or token physicalism), respectively.
Nomological monism says that the mental and the physical are identical by laws. According to this view, all the mental stuffs are reduced to all the physical stuffs, by lawlike ways.
Anomalous monism is a view that both the mental and the physical are physical in nature, but there is no lawlike way to make the mental stuffs be reduced to the physical stuffs. So, anomalous monists say that identities between the mental and the physical are not nomological, which means psychophysical identities are not between types but between tokens.
As I already said, Fodor's choice of the labels "token physicalism" and "type physicalism" is unfortunate, because the
token-type distinction doesn't really correspond to the
particular-universal or
object/event-property distinction. Davidson's token physicalism is an
event physicalism, according to which all mental events are physical events. He regarded events as a basic ontological category and as unstructured "blobs". That is,
Davidsonian events are different from
Kimian events (named after Jaegwon Kim), which are complex entities, viz. states of affairs composed of objects/substances and properties.
If type physicalism is property physicalism, then Davidson isn't a type physicalist, because he is a nominalist (antirealist) about properties. But he endorses
concept/predicate dualism, according to which psychological concepts/predicates are irreducibly different from physical ones. Correspondingly, his event physicalism can be defined as the view that all events satisfying or describable by psychological concepts/predicates are also satisfying or describable by physical concepts/predicates.
"Events in Davidson are thought to be concrete spacetime particulars, and fundamental in the sense that they are not reducible to, or constructed out of, other entities, say substances and properties. Davidson did important and influential work on the language of events and actions, in particular on the “logical form” of sentences reporting events and actions. However, he never gave anything like a full metaphysical theory of events; for example, he had nothing explicit to say about the relationship between events and objects, and we are left with an impression that, for Davidson, both objects and events are among the basic ontological categories. And events, like objects, can fall under kinds (a belief, a pain, an explosion, etc.) and have properties (being sudden, unexpected, violent, etc.)."
(Kim, Jaegwon. "The Very Idea of Token Physicalism." In
New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical, edited by Simone Gazzano and Christopher S. Hill, 167-185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 172)
"Davidson is part of a nominalist tradition that rejects properties, at least as his critics conceive of them. Davidson instead formulates anomalous monism in terms of predicates and descriptions. An event is mental if it answers to a mental predicate, physical if it answers to a physical predicate. Davidson's critics assume that if an event is picked out by both sorts of predicate, this must be because it includes a mental property and a physical property. But Davidson thinks about the mental–physical distinction as merely a difference in description, not as the expression of an ontological divide between kinds of property. For Davidson, then, it makes no more sense to ask whether an event had a particular effect in virtue of being mental or in virtue of being physical than it would to ask whether its effect stemmed from its being described in English or in German."
(
"Mental Causation," by David Robb and John Heil.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013.)