Ep. 398: Donald Davidson on Mind vs. Body (Part One)

Introducing Donald Davidson's work

0:00It's not too late to sign up for my Key Ideas in the Philosophy of Mind fall online course. See partiallyexaminedlife.com slash class for details.

0:18You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 398 is something like, do our reasons cause our actions? And we read two papers by Donald Davidson, Actions, Reasons and Causes from 1963 and Mental Events from 1970. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com. This is Mark Lintemeyer picking up the nomological slack in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:48This is Wes Alwan, trying and failing to bring my thoughts under a governing law in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And this is Christopher Heath with a pro attitude toward drinking paint in North Hollywood. Welcome back, Chris. Yeah. Good to be back, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. This is super interesting. Chris is going to be here for the next one as well. We knew that Dylan had just started a new job and is going to miss some episodes. Seth was still supposed to be here, but he just had a last minute flight thing.

1:21So I guess he has suffered through these articles and does not get to share his insights. Yikes. That's unfortunate. So we've done a little Davidson before. We did on the very idea of a conceptual scheme was the article we had done from him before, which relates to these because it's about the holistic nature of how we understand other people's minds. And in that article, he was concerned about truth and the fact that we, when just to interpret another person, you have to assume that they're telling the truth most of the time, right?

1:53If you didn't, you would not understand their words. You could never learn language unless people were, when they're pointing out, your parents are pointing at a tree and saying, tree, if they were lying to you, then you would never learn language. Yeah, because we're interpreting each assertion against a bunch of background knowledge that is largely, he doesn't say this, but based on testimony. Yes. And if none of that were true, we would lose the capacity to genuinely interpret speech acts. None of this would have gotten off the ground without all that.

2:24So strangely, that past essay that we did, which I had picked is not part of his essays on actions and events is sort of the big book that I owned from him. And these are two of the famous things in it, which Wes, you were saying before we should start with the chronologically second one, mental events.

Mental events and physical determinism

2:42Yeah.

Mental events and physical determinism

2:43I just think it's easier to understand what he's on about. Did you not agree? I do agree. So let's see if we can put them both in context, just that, right, the mental events paper is about, he actually starts it by just asking the Kantian question about, can the mind both be determined in that, you know, it's a brain, we are brains, we are physical things, and we are in that net of causal determinism, but can it also be free? The modern sort of interpretation of that is not that, you know, we have a soul that is out

3:16there by itself outside of the causal order entirely. In fact, Davidson stresses that in our everyday talk, mental things affect physical things. I saw a physical thing in the world. There was a physical thing appeared in front of me, and it caused a sensation of this, which caused a contemplation, a decision, and the decision moved my body and did some things. So it seems like it is in that causal network, but yet, so he's going to argue ultimately, yes, there's still various reasons why the realm of the mental should be considered separate

3:51from the strict causal determinism of the physical. At the same time, you can still, you know, believe that without being a Cartesian dualist, you can think that mental events are brain events. Yeah, he's going to argue that mental events are identical to brain events, that you couldn't alter a mental event without altering the underlying brain state, you know, underneath it. But he's going to say that that is a token, token identity. And it's also important to figure out, right, that identity means that the same token event

4:22has different descriptions. It has a mental description. It has a physical description. So when we say mental events can cause physical events and vice versa, really, I think we have to think of as mental events under physical events to talk about that causality ultimately. But, you know, maybe I'm misreading him there. In any case, regardless of how we think about that causality, there's the question of coming under a universal law, because this is the way Wittgenstein and Hume and others have thought of this. If there's any given causal event, there has to be a universal covering law, because otherwise

4:57it doesn't make sense to talk about causality, right? We're just talking about a kind of regularity in the world. One event routinely follows another, and that's why we even call it a cause, according to Hume. But he largely accepts that, but he also accepts the fact that there can be token, token, one-off causality under some sort of description, right? So if I slip and fall on a banana, there's no law that relates human beings to bananas. Really, the underlying law is more about objects and friction than things like that.

5:28Not knowing about all that stuff, right, doesn't prevent me from knowing that the banana caused me to slip. So we can understand one-off causality, even if we don't understand the description under which there is some covering law. We might understand one-off causality at a level of description where there is no law. And his argument is going to be that at the level of mental descriptions of events, there might be general correlations, but there's no real law-like correlations between mental

6:00and physical events. What we want to say about the relationship between mental events, I think, is similar. But the main point is about this relationship between mental and physical events. And if there is no such correlation, there's a way in which the mental is freed of the physical, is not determined by it in the typical sense. You're right. There's no psychophysical bridge laws that we're going to be able to reduce it in the same way, to be able to talk about it in a nomological way. They're just fundamentally different sort of levels of description. Nomological there. It's what we've been talking about when you, yeah, just explicitly.

6:32Yeah. Nomological is just going to be law-like. It might even be worth, if we're going to start with, I totally understand why you would want to start with mental events. It feels like the argument that goes on and the thing that the sort of specific thing he's focused on in mental events is like a little bit of a smaller part of his other actions, reasons, and causes. Like there's, you can see where the inspiration was, but I think it makes sense to start with mental events. And we could just talk about the three principles that he lays out just to like set the landscape of why someone might be, think there's a problem to solve it all. The principles that he gives in the beginning of the paper.

7:04Yeah. Mark, how do you feel like that? Do you want to dive in or do you want to give a broad description of the other paper?

Reasons as causes and rationalization

7:09Right.

Reasons as causes and rationalization

7:10Let's at least mention what it is, right? The way he states this, again, this is seven years earlier. And he seems to be arguing with Elizabeth Anscombe. They're both students of Wittgenstein. So both of them, when they're thinking about how an intention relates to an action, they're not introspectionists. They are not like, I just look in my mind and I see, I really want to move my arm and then my arm moves. You know that they're both going to be sort of more behavioral oriented, more about how we interpret other people's actions, how things, it's Wittgenstein, how the background of assumptions

7:44and practices, in other words, the language game, as Wittgenstein puts it. So what is the game that we're engaged in when we try to figure out why somebody did something? And so Davidson wants to argue that having a reason and then performing an action based on that reason, which he calls rationalization, that that's just a type of causation. Yeah. So that's what we're going to be talking about in mental events. One of the ways that I sort of tried to characterize it in my head is if you could just to like set the stage, because it is, he even points out that the common sense notion is that reasons are causes, that it's perfectly normal to say like the reason I got up to get the cup

8:17of coffee is because I wanted caffeine and that could be a cause. And, but philosophy, at least where we were in the landscape then had through the influence of Wittgenstein, Anscombe and others he responds to, yeah, they kind of, the consensus was that causes and reasons were not the same type of thing. And so you might think of it like this, if you do a perfectly normal thing, you get up, you get a cup of coffee and someone asks you, you know, why did you do that? And you go, well, I was, I wanted some caffeine. What are you exactly saying there? Are you saying there's this non-spatio-temporal thought that moved matter around in your brain?

8:48And there's a physical connection there? Or are you just rationalizing your behavior? You're placing your behavior in a sort of logical space of being able to justify why you did it. Which picture are you doing? And so at this point, I think a lot of, at least the analytics school was kind of, they thought of causes as that kind of re-description, that kind of rationalization of your behavior, making it coherent. And they didn't think that reasons had the structure of causes. And so Donaldson wants to come along and go, actually, we can defend the common sense notion. And he, he, he, that's what he'll kind of go through and defend in both papers. I think.

9:19I was wondering which of us was going to elide Donald Davidson as Donaldson first. And so you win the prize, Chris. Wow. That's embarrassing, I guess. Let me sharpen this a little bit. It's not Davidson's example, but it relates to having reasons to believe something or another. So for instance, if I have reason to believe the special theory of relativity because of all the research that I've done, and maybe even invent the special theory of relativity, do I think of all those insights that I've had and all those things I've learned that led

9:53me to develop the theory caused of the theory? It's a really weird way to put it from the first person point of view, because I think into this in terms of being receptive to something in the world, being receptive to what's true about things. And to say that I'm caused makes it seem kind of like it's something blind, right? So if I'm doing arithmetic and I say five plus five equals 10 and someone asked me how I

10:25reached that conclusion, if I said, well, you know, this one brain state followed another brain state and then that came out with that correlated to 10, that would be an odd thing to say because, you know, I know that five plus five equals 10 because I can see that five plus five equals 10. So this gives you some of the flavor of the difference between the world of reasons from the first person point of view. This is something we got into a little bit in our Korsgaard episode, right? And the third person point of view from which it becomes causal.

10:56And often these two realms would just be strictly separated, right? So if I'm going to the fridge to get something to eat and someone asked me why, I say I'm hungry. That's within the realm of reasons. On a biological level, it's, you know, why did this machine get up and start going over to the fridge and take something out and put it in its mouth? Well, there's a bunch of stuff that went on in the brain that, and then little cords yanked on those limbs and made them do it. And there's no net necessity of referring to anything from the first person point of view.

11:29So then it gets tricky if we want to cross back and forth between those two realms. And we could say, I went to the fridge, you know, I was feeling hungry because of that brain state and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the overall point is that, so for Davidson is going to reject this point of view that reasons aren't causes and tell us how they are causes without violating some of the intuitions that I've just given about the difference between reasons and causes. Yeah. He definitely agrees with the idea that there's something to be said about the way it's characterized

12:02in the current, during his time. The reasons, as you said, that they have this kind of justificatory function as well, but that's just not all they do. Right. And you could have a justification for an action, but yet that's not actually what made you perform that action. It's just sort of argument that he'll nail down. Yeah. And I, so I think there's the, you know, the question of things being under different descriptions becomes important again. It does, big time. Yeah. So it's, to put it back in Wittgenstein's language, right? Is, is the reason giving game a different language game than the cause specifying game

12:35that you might think that I'm a physical scientist and I'm looking for the causes of something. And I don't say the electron moved from here to there because it wanted to, I don't know that that's wanting is from a different language game. Yeah. He's going to want to say that, you know, one of them is going to use law-like or nomological sort of just connections. And then the other one is going to be normative and holistic. And he's going to talk about how those are just sort of incommensurable in terms of their vocabularies. We're not going to be able to transfer between them very easily, but that's more in the paper.

13:06I had, I enjoyed the papers a lot and it was tough. The first time I read through actions, reasons, and causes was tough because I didn't have some of that, you know, I've got the common sense intuition as well. So it was a struggle for me to figure out how we would have come to this place where we don't think reasons are causes, at least in some sense. But so immersing myself in some of that, especially Anscombe's paper, intentionality and stuff was cool to sort of investigate that. And I felt like I got a better understanding of why Davidson needed to give such pushback. Do you want to say anything about the Anscombe? And I tried to give some intuitions about this, but I'm sure she's much more precise,

13:39but yeah, go ahead. She wants to talk about when we're using reasons, we're talking about, yeah, it's essentially a normative situation where we're going to be talking about language, rule following, social context, justification for, yeah, you're sort of making sense of, you know, I like to say to use Solaris in language, you're placing your behavior in the logical space of reasons for being able to justify what you did. That's what's going on. That's the game you're playing. You're not doing a, let's make law-like connections and giving kind of a chain. That's just a different language game.

14:09That would be what they're doing in the physical sciences. You wouldn't be doing that when you're talking about your mental events, according to Anscombe. Right. So five plus five justifies thinking that the sum is 10, but there's no justification under the brain event description. It's just purely causal. The rock doesn't justify breaking the window or something like that. It's just not, it would make sense. Think about it like that. Yeah. We officially did Anscombe's intention, but we did it like as the third reading on a past podcast and I then did a not school group on it.

14:41So folks who are supporters can go find that. In fact, I just re-uploaded it to Patreon, but I didn't get a chance to read the whole thing. I'll get into what little I do remember when we actually get to this paper. But I think just to say one more thing about the sort of the, why I picked this now, we knew that Dylan was going to be gone. I was, you know, searching for something he wasn't necessarily going to mind missing. I mean, we should say about Davidson style is remarkably clear in sentence by sentence

15:12basis. But when you put it all together, you're just like, wait a second, what is the point of this? What? Like, it's very easy or it's easy to kind of fall asleep. He's a very just low. It's dense. It's very dense. You know, I have to reread stuff a lot. I just got to, you know, that's just the way it is. And like, you have to do that a lot with analytic guys. But Davidson's so sharp. You have to really pay attention. Yep. And he's not explicitly mentioning all context. You know, he does some, but it would be helpful to know a little bit more, for instance, about the covering law thing that he's responding to.

15:43Yes. He's very much in the literature. He's responding to other people. And so he has a little more research. Assuming his readers know the literature pretty well. He's name dropping like crazy. Yeah. But yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. I will say that some of the stuff I'm sympathetic to, just because I'm already, when it comes to philosophy of mind stuff, I like non-reductive physicalist attitudes or naturalist attitudes. So that's cool to see an argument for the, you know, anomalous monism. And then in addition, my interest in philosophy of science was super relevant here because I'm very interested in reduction in the sciences and whether or not, you know, sometimes there's

16:15a distinction between ontological reduction and epistemic reduction. And so I think Davidson actually highlights that distinction in the mental events paper when he wants to talk about, there is one event, you know, they're ontologically reducible to each other, but they're not epistemically reducible. They're fundamentally different description levels, different. Yeah. So that's cool to see out of this. Yeah. There's, we are, you're starting to tread already into areas that I feel uncomfortable with, but let's. Moby, Moby. I'm just excited. Sure. Right. I was trying to say why. So I just thought this would be a nice bridge.

16:46I knew we were going to do Dan Dennett next when Wes is gone, who is a very much a Wittgensteinian leaning behaviorist. I'm sure aware of Davidson and Quine and folks like that, you know, Quine, I think is falling directly on Wittgenstein. So Davidson seemed a good link between Charles Sanders Peirce and Dennett, right? In terms of these, we're not going to talk about our introspective states, right? Peirce says there is no such thing as introspection at all, but Peirce is, you know, such an anomaly and is not in the literature talking to other people.

17:19I mean, he read a lot, but he's not actively engaged with other. He's talking to logic textbooks and Dunn's scoters. Yes, exactly. Whereas, you know, Dennett is doing his own exhaustive thing dealing with the literature of his time. But Davidson, yeah, really interesting guy. I can also, I'll point out there's a whole series of conversations that other philosophers have with Davidson late in his life on YouTube. So I watched a Richard Rorty and Davidson one, and there is a P.F.

17:50Strawson and Davidson one that I think most of them are around that's the subject of truth and knowledge and stuff like that. Not exactly in the area that we were. But if you want to hear Davidson talk, there's plenty of it.

Three principles of the mental

18:03Shall we proceed? Mental events. Chris, you were saying we should read the three principles from the beginning. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, summarism. So the first one is... The principle of causal interaction, right? Yeah, between the mental and the physical. Give us the Bismarck example. Yeah, I mean, basically, if someone sank the Bismarck, then various mental events such as perceivings, notings, calculations, judgments, decisions, intentional actions, and changes of belief played a causal role. So he wants to say that mental events sometimes cause physical events. He wants to say that that's just true.

18:33And vice versa, right? Yeah, exactly. There's a feedback. I mean, if I drop a book on my foot and it causes this anger or pain in me, you know? Or you could just see the book and have to drop it on your foot. Yeah, I don't have to be... I guess I'm a sadomasochist in that sense. But yeah, that's just... It's a very straightforward principle of causal interaction. Can I... Go ahead. Just to nitpick every single thing, because I feel like, Wes, we've brought this up many times and you're like, oh, no, no, no. Strictly speaking, kind of, I think, for reasons we put forward, you know, the mental and the physical are different language games or different patterns of...

19:05There is no psychophysical causation. So... But did you object to... He's just saying this. This is an assumption that everyone will agree to. I think in the broader sense, yes, there's psychophysical causation. If we think of token events that have multiple descriptions, and we know that those token events are causally related and that they have the two different descriptions. But do I think there's something fishy about crossing right back and forth between the two

19:36domains? Strictly speaking, what's causing you to move are brain events, not motivations. And we run into all sorts of philosophical problems when we try to do interactionism in more of a Cartesian way, if we say the thought caused the body to do something. But those brain events are identical to them. Yeah, once we do an identity, an identity of Davidson's sort between the mental and the physical, then I think the problems that I've talked about kind of fall away and they get transferred into the problem of identity.

20:08What do you mean by that? Yes. What does that sort of identity mean? So it kind of shifts the problem and I'm happy to let that go for this. Or at least we'll get to it after we... Yeah, like we can still... Because that's a serious concern for sure. Like, what does it mean to say they're identical? But I mean, you're saying they both cause it, right? Mental events cause physical events. I see where it's already, you might be suspicious of that. These individual token events, whatever they are at some deeper level, cause each other. And then we have these two descriptions, right? It looks... Think about this as very Spinozan or monistic.

20:40Ultimately, if you want, right? There's some underlying thing. It's just that he's not saying the underlying thing is some monistic stuff. He's saying it's the token thing. He's saying it's the X. That's his kind of analytic way. And to be fair, he does this in the other paper, right? Like he makes some... He wants to say reasons or causes and he kind of goes through with the arguments of why you might think this mental thing, event is. So some of it's in the other paper as well. He has some responses to this. We'll get to it. So the second thing is that causality is nomological, which you already explained a little bit, Chris.

21:12But if there is a cause-effect relation, then there must be some deterministic law that covers it. And I kind of gave a little explanation of this too already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The nomological character of causality. Yeah. Where there is causality, there must be a law. Which again, that sounds less controversial to me. Well, and he brings this up in terms of Hume sometimes, right? That for Hume, you literally do not know whether when you see two events back to back, you don't know whether one has caused the other. Because every time you write, turn your head, I mean, you're perceiving the world in your

21:47left and now you're perceiving the world in your right. Well, did the world in your left cause the world in your right? No, because we don't always see those in that sequence. If we always see the dawn causing the day, causing the afternoon, causing the night, you know, we always see that sequence. So we could call that causal in some way, right? For Hume, that's all it is, is can you establish that there's a regularity? And because you can shake your head all over the place in any pattern you want, you're not

22:17going to say that different areas of your visual field cause the other ones in any sense like that. But you're always, even when you encounter a novel, one-time instance of causality, you've never seen one thing follow. If you want to attribute causality to it, you are saying, well, there's some regularity there. If this thing were to happen again, this first thing, then something like the second thing would happen in repeated circumstances. So it is kind of a puzzle for Hume, how you can, for the first time, see something as causal, right? Because it has to be based on induction. Yeah.

22:47Temporal succession is important here, and both Hume and Kant make something of that, right? To rule out your head-shaking counter-example. But I don't think it's uncontroversial, because there are many, like the banana example I gave, there are many descriptions under which there is no covering law. And if we, people can go listen to our essentialism episode, we don't necessarily want to think about this in terms of regularities that are somehow primary. We could think of things as having dispositional properties.

23:19So even if there were only one event that ever happened in the world, and it were some electron doing something in a field, and we weren't able to derive a, right, a law out of it exactly, that would still be a causal event. And it depends on the dispositional property of the electron. And then the, you know, we derive, and we could be nominalists about this in a way, we derive the laws, but everything at bottom depends on these dispositional properties. So anyway, it gets complicated. But the point of view, and also it's not, you know, I did, I looked this up.

23:51I don't think it's widely, the nomological view is the widely accepted view among philosophers today. I think it's still disputed, but I don't think it has the monopoly. Yeah, there's a lot of dispute about whether there are scientific laws, big time. So the third principle, the anomalism of the mental, right? The point of these is, can all three of these principles coexist? And he's going to argue in this paper that they can. So we've said mental and physical actions causally interact, mental and physical action. We say that any causality has to be law-like. The third one is the anomalism of the mental.

24:23There are no strict deterministic laws to predict and explain mental events, which it should follow from the other two principles that there are strict laws to predict and explain mental events, right? If mental events are part of the causal web with physical events and all causality, certainly in the physical realm has this law-like character, if we're going to accept that, then it seems there should be a law-like character of mental events. But we intuitively do not think so, right? You know, if you desire to go to the store, well, you know, that's a good reason for you

24:56to go to the store. Did that cause you to, is there a law that says every time someone has a desire to go to the store, they will go to the, no. Because, you know, there's all these other things they could do. There's all the, you know, maybe you'll go to the store, you go to the store later. Maybe the store is not open. Maybe you have no way to get to the store. There's so many other, you know, the big web of beliefs and desires that make up what we consider from getting from a reason to an action actually being performed. It doesn't seem like we could fine tune a mental law that says, yes, everybody, everyone who

25:33loves will suffer, you know, that kind of thing. Like those are only good for rough. Well, let me just add something here. Yeah. Even physical scientific laws are idealized, right? They're idealized in the sense that there's lots of factors that are going to interfere with their pure expression in reality. So a planet may, there's a law for how, inverse square law for how one planet is going to move around another. But there's going to be, are we going to see that? Well, let's give a better example. For something falling to the earth, there's a law of acceleration about how it's going to

26:05do that. But there's other interfering factors like friction from the wind and all that. And in some cases, the factors are just too numerous, right? We can, for practical purposes, we can figure it out. But to figure it out with the complete precision, all those factors prevent us from doing that. But that doesn't mean that there's not actually an underlying law. That's, you know, even if the idealization isn't seen perfectly in reality. But with those physical events, right, we could, those caveats, we can sort of indefinitely refine. Then we can keep taking into account factors in principle to get closer and closer.

26:40You'll call it asymptotic, closer and closer to the truth. In the case of the mental, there isn't that, right? It never stops because we have to keep referring to new attitudes, new propositional attitudes in order to explain the one that came before. But we can't understand the new propositional attitude without another one. And that never stops. But we'll get to a more detailed explanation of that, I think, later in the paper. But he doesn't really explain it up front. Right. It can't be exactly what you said, because to understand a propositional attitude, we always

27:14have to understand another propositional attitude. That would mean, you know, an infinite regress. And we would never understand any propositional attitudes. But yeah, we clearly do. Right. But not to understand it, but to explain it. Right. And to predict. That's the big thing. The way I was presenting the, you know, I'll go to the store unless, you know, all these, all other conditions being equal. I have a car that can get to the store. The store is not closed. Blah, blah, blah. So, yes, it sounds like you could asymptotically make it more. But I can always just decide not to go to the store, even if I want to go to the store.

27:48So this is the intuition, I think, that's, you know, behind what makes the mental events. It's the Kantian intuition that we want to be able to say that even though we are biological, physical things, we still make decisions and that we can discuss at the end whether what he actually proves actually supports the Kantian point. But that's the way he presents it, that he wants freedom. Yeah. It's an old problem, right? Yeah. How do we reconcile these three principles? You know, like they seemingly, at least the last one seemingly contradicts the first two.

28:19Yeah. But the way we understand the mental and the physical, and he wants to say that we can have our cake and eat it too. Like we can actually have all these be true. That's what he's going to try to do in the paper at the least. Yeah. But just to reiterate later on in the paper, he is going to try and give some justification for this third principle. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he wants all principles to be true. Yeah. And he explained it in various ways. Yep. He just doesn't explain it upfront. But he moves on to this question of consistency. And as we can see, if two and three are true, it seems to be the case that one isn't true.

28:51If causality is nonological and there's no strict deterministic laws for mental events, then there can't be in causal interaction between the mental and physical. But if one and two are true, causal interaction plus the nonological, then the three can't be true. We would have to have strict deterministic laws for mental events. He's going to show how they're all consistent. Let's stop and talk about our sponsor, Shopify. Perhaps you have a business idea, but it's just been sitting there. Perhaps you need an inciting reason to make that business idea a reality. Well, here's your reason right here.

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Token identity versus type identity

30:08That's Shopify.com slash P-E-L. All right. So now we're up to section one of the paper where he's going to establish an identity theory of the mental and physical that makes it so those three principles can be reconciled. Wes, I think you already told us what it is, which is token-token identity, not type-type identity. If you said pain is the firing of C-fibers in the brain is the classic example. Well, then it seems like we could always predict, you know, I'm going to make your C-fibers and that's going to make it so that. But, well, does he actually tell us why type-type is off the table here other than it would have.

30:46Yeah. So he's going to give this criterion of the mental. Yeah. What counts as mental? The sort of propositional attitudes that he... And it's, you know, and then he's going to say, well, it's mental vocabulary, propositional attitudes, right? Something is mental if our descriptions use propositional attitudes like believing, et cetera, et cetera. Which he has to state in the pretentious analytic philosophy where they do not admit of substitutions. So that if Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, they're just different senses of it. Then if I hit Superman, then I have hit Clark Kent.

31:17But if I believe that Superman has a mustache, that's different than my believing that Clark Kent has a mustache. So those are in an intentional context. It's what's called, right? Yes. Yeah. Psychological verbs create these non-extensional contexts, which is important. You know, it seems a little bit fishy to just do this analytic semantic thing of saying, oh, what's the mental? How do we define the mental? It's when we use mental vocabulary. It seems circular. They just want... They try to be precise because they want to be able to work with what... But I agree it's a little overkill for me.

31:49But it leaves... Yeah, it's leaving the question open of what the ontology of the mental is. We're just starting out with how we generally identify it. He wants to separate cleanly physical and mental for him. So we can... Yeah. So the important thing, you know, this is page two. Is it... I'm sorry, not page two. This is... PDF page four. 140 or yeah. 139. 139. But, you know, he's going to say, I haven't given here a criterion of privacy and intentionality. Which leaves open the problem of what about pains and afterimages because that those don't

32:21involve propositional attitudes. But... And then he gives this really ridiculous... Say, well, he's like, well, we can get descriptions in my sense because I could say the pain in John is just the thing that was simultaneous with another event, right? We don't... Do we want to go into that? I don't think we need to. But it's up to you guys. Do you want to dig into that? Yeah. No, I don't want to dig into it, but I just want to give the actual specific example here.

32:51So he'll say the distance seller collision is thus the event X such that P, PX and X is simultaneous with Jones is noticing that a pencil starts to roll across his desk. So we can do that for pain. So even though pain doesn't technically fall into his category of the mental because it's not a propositional attitude, we could say, well, it's simultaneous with another propositional attitude somewhere. So we can give it a description of under which we say it simultaneously. And that's a mental description.

33:23Therefore, it's a mental event. Of course, that means that everything has a mental description, right? So the distance seller collision, we can also put under a mental description by talking about its simultaneity with a propositional attitude somewhere at some given time. So it's weird. And he admits that and says, I'm not going to try and work that out right now. Doesn't he says it doesn't threaten the project, right? It can only strengthen the hypothesis that all mental events are identical with physical events. If we say that, well, that makes everything mental because you can re-describe it in a mental way, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, he doesn't. Yes. But this is lame still.

33:54But yeah, it is. It is. A fun consideration. I left that out of my notes entirely. Yeah. I mean, I get why it's one of those. So he brings up the type, Charles Taylor, he points to as having a type type identity theory, right? If the only identities are kinds of events, then the identity theory would have correlating laws, right? That every time you have a pain, there's a C fibers. Every time I think of my mother, then this part of my brain goes off. And so we should be able to go into your brain and click that part of your brain and you'll

34:25think of your mother or something if that's really the way it works. But that's probably not the way it actually works. Yeah. So he doesn't really dwell on this as a cognitive science thesis or something. I think this is something that deserves a lot more explanation. We're going to use these semantic considerations to just say, well, the mental kind of talk is different. It's a different level of explanation than the physical kind of talk. And we got to talk about, you know, how those two things relate to the law-like characteristics.

34:55He's just worried about it being, becoming reductionism. If we're going to say it's type type. Well, I think Mark has a good, like, I don't know that we get enough justification here, right? So that's normally the way we think of this brain-mind relationship. We are thinking in terms of type type. And it is true. You can do a lot. This guy Penfield did a lot of experiments with this, where you stimulate certain parts of the brain. I guess many, much of it was random. People were having certain memories or something, or even re-experiencing things when he stimulated

35:27certain parts of the brain. But we do know that we can reliably stimulate certain parts of the brain to get a certain category of mental activity. There are these general connections. There just aren't these very, very specific law-like connections as there are in the physical sciences. But that's a problem for him because he acknowledges that there are these generalities. And then the question is, well, when, where does loose generalization end and law begin

35:58or something like that? Right. At this point, he's just, you know, okay, that's, we're just going to categorize different views on identity. And he gives this, this breakdown with the two axes, right? Are there laws or are there not? Are mental and physical one, or are they dual? And so you can get a little grid of four possible positions. Nomological monism, there are correlating laws and mental and physical are one in the same. That would be the type type identity theory. The one that he, the other two are kinds of dualism. And then the one he likes are anomalous monism, right?

36:31Lawless monism there. So there are no correlating laws yet on, at the token level, the mental and physical are one in the same for any mental. Yeah. There is some physical description of this mental act, this thinking of my mother. Okay. There's, I don't know what it is and I, maybe I don't have to. So yeah. Token identity, but not type identity. So nomological monism is just materialism, right? Token events. They just are a brain. They just, yeah, they're type type.

37:01So the brain states are just mental events. Yeah. But also there's correlating laws. Nomenological dualism, that's like parallelism or epiphenomenalism. You get, there isn't actually an identity, right? You have these two different domains, the mental and the physical, but there's laws that correlate them. And then you get this sort of layer of the mental that's correlated to the physical, but not identical to it. Then anomalous dualism, Descartes, no laws, no identity, right? So the non-identity for Descartes means there's an ontological dualism, which is, right, different

37:35mind substance and different physical substance. And then, so monism is Mark, as Mark described it, identity, but no laws. So I'm not totally sure if nomological monism is equivalent to materialism because. Well, he says it is. Okay. All right. So you can be a materialist, but yet still believe that there are language games that involve the mental and that are, you can't eliminate. So you can be a materialist without being an eliminative materialist. I think type A physicalism is, I think, what specifically it more resembles insofar as

38:05it's their type type, right? Like it would be the specific kind. Whereas you could be a different kind of physicalist like you're describing and not think that there are, doesn't have that nomological character, psychophysical laws. Well, nomological monism is type, type identity. That's what correlating laws means. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I just wasn't sure if Chalmers is the one who I had read about this, you know, type one dualism, type one monism, type two monism, which, so he believes in philosophical zombies that you can have, not in the actual world, but at least in possible worlds, you could have

38:37someone that has all the same physical characteristics, but yet has different mental characteristics. So you could have philosophical zombies that are, have brains identical to ours, but yet they don't have qualia. I guess, I mean, Davidson, I know from listening to some of those lectures is highly dislikes any philosophy based on science fiction examples. Yeah. I mean, even the next section, he kind of goes into this, right? Like where it's not going to, he kind of talks about, I mean, at least to me, it sounds like he's almost referencing that in the next section.

39:07He wants to show that the supervenience, I mean, I guess it's not the next section. It's just the next part of, cause we're still in part one, but his Tarski example and stuff where he wants to talk about the supervenience, right? Where he's going to say, you know, you can't, the event's the same. You can't change the physical and it won't affect the mental. You can't do that. They're not separable in that sense. Yeah. Right. And that would, that would speak to the philosophical zombie claim where actually you can't separate these. So there are no zombies on, I think on for him, either the nomological monism or anomalous monism. There could not be zombies that you'd have to be some kind of dualist.

39:41He doesn't address this though. He doesn't tell us what he thinks about. There can't be two events in all physical respect, but differing in some mental respect that. Yeah. Yeah. They just can't be different. Zombies was my, what came to mind to me. Chalmers would agree with that as well. That's in this world under these particular laws. He's just, Chalmers is talking about a logical possibility. Oh, I see. You think that Davidson would say he's not talking. Yeah. Okay. I see. You think he'd still think it's logically possible? Well, I don't know. It depends on what he wants to go, where he wants to go modally and what he wants to do

40:12with the difference between logical and metaphysical and nomological possibility. But yeah, I don't know that.

Tarski's indefinability theorem

40:18So, but it's time for Chris to explain Tarski's indefinability theorem to us. Oh man. Cause I worked very hard on this and I gave up. I know it's related to Gödel's theorem. I know it involves something to do with the self-reference, but he's going to give this logical example where we have two different languages and he's going to show that there's anomalism here, right? One of the languages is just the original language, which is as all the physical predicates plus

40:49some math. And then that's the language L and then L prime gives us the ability to make truth statements about that language, which he takes to be mental. All right, Chris, take it from here. I mean, I think his analogies are important here, right? He's sort of just talking about the way in which the supervenience doesn't, it's not necessary that you have it be reducible by law. It doesn't entail reducibility, I guess, right? The same way that's why he uses the moral properties. They depend on descriptive facts, but they don't reduce to them. That's an example.

41:20And then the Tarski example is he's saying something like truth in a formal system will depend. It's going to depend on the syntax, but it can't be reduced to the sort of predicates, the syntactic predicates. Does that make sense?

41:34No. So we could list. No, it doesn't. Well, it kind of makes sense now that you say. I mean, like spell check, right? Like spell check can tell you what you've spelled wrong, but it can't tell you whether a sentence is true. Does that make it worse? Well, language L prime, right? What is it doing? It's allowed to make reference to all these physical statements and say whether they're true or false. Do I have that right? Yes. True.

42:04L, L. It's all physical language. It's all sentences about physical stuff. And then L prime is just, you add to that something is true in L. So saying my foot moved two feet, that is a physical statement. And if you say it is true that my foot moved two feet, well, you're already on this bringing in, by bringing in truth, you're bringing in the mental. I think that's what he's saying. Yes. And then, so what is his claim here that's relevant about L, L prime?

42:38I mean, L prime is supposed to be the mental, right? L prime is supposed to represent the mental. So what he says is if set L is consistent, right, all the physical ones, it's a closed system, then there's no predicate of syntax that applies to all and only the true sentences of L. But why is that? It has something to do with the liar's paradox. Well, that's Tarski's undefinability theorem. That's what this is. Yes. So doesn't it just mean that L prime is not, cannot be part of L? So it's just to say a mental sentence, you might think that because, you know, you're

43:10seeing the Bismarck cause you to have a thought of the Bismarck, which caused you to have some actions to sink the Bismarck. It's not whether it can be part of L, it's whether we can get any law-like relationships between L and L prime. If L prime is the mental event, right? The mental event, you can pick it out with the physical vocabulary, but there's no way to get a law. There's no physical predicate that captures the law or captured by a law. I just want to understand this purely at a logical level before we get to mental and physical. There's a relationship between the two languages, L and L prime.

43:42There's no biconditional X such that X is true in L if and only if X is phi, where phi is replaced by a physical predicate of predicate L. That's the part I don't understand. But, you know, again, I was planning on skipping this, so I don't want to get us bogged down here. I think some of it I took for granted that it's just the case that L prime is going to supervene on L, which you can pick out. You're just not going to be able to go backwards, if you will. But maybe I don't know how to articulate why that's true. I just sort of was like, oh, Tarski's right or whatever. It made tremendous sense to me the second time that I considered it, when I was actually

44:14taking my notes on this. And now it seems to have escaped me that it's not just that L prime is a completely separate sphere. Oh, that's the mental. It is literally the L prime is defined as true in L. But it's L augmented with true in L. It's got all the physical language still. OK, yes. With the predicate truth in L. So, yes, that would be self-referential. So L prime either cannot be a consistent set or it cannot be complete set. L can itself be consistent and complete, but L prime cannot be.

44:48And Mark, you and I had to prove completeness and consistency stuff, I mean, and teach it. And I just text this and I can't remember enough to. We had a whole girdle episode and a Tarski episode. So people can go look at that. I'm sure we'll remember it a little better. All right. Let's just keep moving on here. It seems another lame, if it involves a liar's paradox and self-reference, it's just as lame to me as the whole simultaneity with the star exploding. But anyway, let's leave that aside. Well, that was so in watching the conversation between Donald Davidson and Rorty, Rorty was

45:22just agreeing with a lot of what Davidson, you know, the upshot of Davidson's sort of Wittgensteinian points that like these things that philosophers have really tried to pick apart are misconceived and you should just stop doing that. And so he would point at something that Davidson had done. Rorty would point at it and say, for instance, we're talking about events. How do you individuate events? And there's a whole, Davidson has a whole paper where he uses extensive logical symbolism like this. And Rorty was just like, did you really have to do that?

45:53Don't we know what events are? Do we really have to have this formal? And Davidson, well, in some circumstances, yes, I think what I did was clarify. And so but ultimately, he's going in the same mostly destructive direction that Rorty was going for he's just sees the size enterprise as purely destructive. I'm only learning these things insofar as to show that analytic philosophy is silly for doing these things, whereas Davidson does actually see intrinsic value in digressions like what we've been discussing.

The irreducibility of the mental

46:24In section two, he's going to admit, right, that we can't prove the irreducibility of the mental. He says, nothing I can say about the irreducibility of the mental deserves to be called the proof and the kind of irreducibility is different. Yeah. So and probably there's a finite number of events in the world, which would help. So if there are a finite number of events, then it seems like we could give a physical opens a sentence that's coextensive with any given mental predicate. So if I have a certain propositional attitude right now, I believe something I could specify

47:01every atom in my brain, the position of it, or maybe at a higher level, certain brain events and things like that. And I could potentially describe every single predicate that's coextensive with that mental event. And he thinks maybe even if there were infinite number of events involved, this would be possible. So we can, and on a token level, mental content can be singled out by purely by using physical concepts. But that doesn't mean that we can do that for types.

47:33And that's the next part. Yeah. We couldn't develop laws between them. Like we can't. Those corresponding between each other or whatever. So me thinking that the cup is on the table at this particular time and place, I could specify everything in my brain that's coextensive, right? That's the physical correlate of that. But me thinking cups are on tables in general and trying to correlate them to brain events via a scientific law, that's what he's going to say isn't going to work.

48:06He's going to say we can do probabilistic generalizations, but we can't get anything like a scientific law out of that correlation. And as we reach the end of our first half here, what do you think of that? Just baldly stated, because I think scientists are continuing to try to do that, that you really can get, as you were just pointing out, Wes, you know, in these, let's do these experiments where we poke around people's brains. And this is the one that makes you the experience the color red. And this is the one that makes you relive the last song you heard.

48:37And this is, you know, it seems like, isn't that what they do? Yeah. He's going to spend a lot of it, like I said, a lot of the rest of this paper kind of trying to explain that. And that includes his holism. Beliefs and desire, I'm quoting here, beliefs and desires, issue and behavior only is modified and mediated by further beliefs and desires. So I think it depends on a lot on what we think of that whole thing. And I find that really intriguing, but also I don't think I could say I fully understand it. Just to give my thoughts on that, I don't find it as offensive, I guess, when I think about it. There are, there's a lot of work in finding sort of crossover between the domains of psychology

49:10and the domains of neuroscience. But there is also some healthy argumentation that they're importantly separate epistemically in some sense, that there are certain, like there isn't a large project to correlate beliefs and cognitive states specifically to whatever their neuroscientific correlate would be. There is room to say, we're just carving up the world differently. And we're, we have different epistemic values or a different framework we're using and they're not commensurable. So I don't mind that. But although I do think there would be a lot more crossover than maybe he thinks. You know, it's a little fuzzy to me. It's just, isn't there a law about how if I stimulate the amygdala in a certain way,

Conclusion and upcoming episodes

49:46I'm going to, it's going to cause fear or something like that. Why isn't that a law? Right? So that's the part, I think that's what Mark's getting at that. And I don't understand it either. There's definitely going to be a lot to be correlated. I think there's a lot, probably more, like I said, than Davidson thought, but I still think there's room for that, what he points to that normative element that you're just not going to get out of the neuroscience because you're not, you're using a different mode of, of description. I think that that's still, but yeah. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's his overall point, which is the vacancy point is it's a different kind of vocabulary. And so we should, you know, maybe you're even like an eliminative, the church lens, these,

50:19these limited materialists that treat our whole talk of beliefs and desires as folk psychology that, well, the scientific one, right? They're basically saying the same thing that if ultimately we want to talk about brain states and we want to say fundamentally what the brain does are these and these and these, and you're listing different types of brain states to think that those are going to correlate one to one with beliefs and desires and wishes. And you know, the normal thing is very unlikely. So I don't follow the limited materialists and saying that, well, the scientific one,

50:50the neurological one is right. And the other one is wrong, you know, in a, or less scientific or something. Well, I mean, it might be less scientific, but that's again, you're not playing the science language game when you're talking about, you know, when I ask you, why did you insult me like that? We're not playing the scientific language game. You know, if you said, well, because of my conditioning in my character and my brain state, like that would not be helpful. Yeah. It doesn't help me because there's, there's still the token token identity regardless of the language game we're playing.

51:21So why isn't it the case, right? The mediation of one belief by another, for instance, that we need to use to understand a propositional attitude at the mental level. Why isn't there just a physical correlate of that mediation? But let's talk about that in the next part. All right. We will pick up on that and get to the second paper in part two. If you are a partially examined life supporter, there are many ways of doing this partially examined life.com slash support. And part two should be in your feed very soon or already, unless you're doing it through

51:53Apple, then you'll still get it next week. The rest of you, yeah, just stick around till next week. Hope you come back. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks night. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.