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

Mental events and behavioral reductionism

0:00You're listening to Parsons Examined Life, episode 398, part two. We've been talking about Donald Davinson's paper Mental Events from 1970. We're going to move back to Actions, Reasons, and Causes from 1963. Presumably, I think we've gone through a lot of the story of mental events. There's three sections to the paper, and we already talked about the first one,

0:30where we're just establishing token-token identity between mental and physical events. And now we have moved into section two. We were talking about how there is no law-like character to mental talk, right? That mental events are anomalous, that they cannot be pulled into the causal nexus that is the closed system of physical events, that we think that, yeah, there's this physical web of causality. And the question, we've already said, mental events are

1:01not completely separate from that, in that I can, there can be a physical thing in the world, and I can see it, right? It gives rise to a mental event in me. I can decide to do something that produces a change in my, in the body. So a physical event. So it's somehow, but it's not part of that, you know, it's not going to be a strict causal laws in the way physical events have. Yeah. So the way he's going to explain this next is in terms of what he calls the failure of definitional behaviorism, and which will lead us into holism. So he thinks it fails in the way that

1:38other forms of reductionism fail, including phenomenalism and extreme naturalism. If you try to reduce in either direction, you run into problems. So for instance, if a man believes there's life on Mars, and we try to reduce those mental concepts to some sort of behavior, like he assents, you know, he's produces this sort of language behavior. Well, we can't really say what it means to assent to something, unless we see that ascent as intentional, right? He might just be

2:11uttering the sound accidentally or something like that. It could be in coincidence. We can't say a yes as the meaning that we say it has, unless we can say something further about the intention. And we can do that. That problem occurs, he says, ad infinitum. There are additional conditions for each new step. We can never stop doing that. Yeah. It's worth reading this quote at the end. He sort of concludes this on page, I think 443. Beliefs and desires issue in behavior only as modified and mediated by further beliefs and desires, attitudes and attendings without limit. Clearly this holism of the mental realm is a clue both

2:45to the autonomy and to the anomalous character of the mental. Yep.

Goodman predicates and conceptual schemes

2:49Which sort of sums that up. And then we're going to go into some Nelson Goodman that we long ago talked on this podcast about grew and bleen. So, you know, there's blue and green. We know what those are, but why can't I, uh, and it seems like if, you know, you could use, you could generalize if you see one emerald is green and all the other emeralds you see are green. Well, you can say they're all green. What can you, can you do something with a concept? Like we'll say what grew is. I don't think you said what grows. Yeah. So grew is blue before time T, which is whatever

3:22time you decide and green after that. So if you're looking right now and you know, so now is time T and it's an emerald. Yeah. Can you say that you're seeing a green emerald? Can you say that you're also seeing a grew emerald? Am I giving the example right? Yeah. So it's blue before time T, right? And green before time T and then blue after that, right? All the emeralds are green. Yeah. But yeah, there you go. So you see after 2030, they're blue. It's great. Yeah. So it seems like it might be true to say it's grew, although we don't know yet. Right. We haven't, if we haven't crossed time T,

3:58but there's no reason to induce, right. Knowing what you know about emeralds, there's no reason to believe that after some given time, they're going to turn blue. There's no reason to believe that they're grew. And so I think the upshot of this is that he says that some predicates are basically unsuited to their objects, right? There might be some object that is grew, but what does he call them? Emer, emeral, emeralires? Yeah. Emery or whatever. Yeah. Emerires. So they're emeralds before time T and sapphires afterward. But grew isn't the right fit for emeralds. And he thinks this is

4:34sort of like an analytic relationship actually. And in the same way that's the mental predicates aren't fit at a nominological level for the physical. So Nelson Goodman's point was just that there are some predicates that are simply not set for law-like behavior at all. And that you shouldn't say something is grew. But so Davidson's response to that is no, you just have to have subjects that fit those predicates. So yes, grew is a very weird predicate. But if you had a very weird subject like emeralires, then that would go with that. And you could have, hey, every time I've seen an

5:07emeralire, it is grew, which in the real world would mean every time I've seen an emerald, it ends up being green. But depending on your conceptual scheme, you could have emeralires. You know, there's lots of reasons why emeralire is not a very useful for to us concept to throw around. But, you know, the important thing is, does, is, is there a match within the language game, within the conceptual scheme? Drawn from the same conceptual family yet? Are they made for each other? That kind of, yeah.

5:39I think he uses that. Made for each other. So we'll say mental and physical predicates are not a priori made for one another. They are more like all emeralds are grew than they are like all emeralds are green. Yet, there are probabilistic generalizations relating them. So it seems like, you know, again, we could have just made that point without bringing in the whole Nelson Goodman hard to understand example by just saying that there are different families of concepts, as you just said, Chris. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's giving, he's trying to throw everything at the wall in terms of helping us

6:13understand this lack of law-like correlation, which I actually like. Sure. You know, he's, he's going the extra mile to try and help us figure this out, but it's still, yeah. Being invited to revisit Nelson Goodman is not a bad thing. And in fact, in the, uh, the book version of this, right, in his essays in action events, there's an appendix, which is a separate essay. It's only three pages that is, uh, just as a footnote in our version, Emma Rose is by other names. So an emerald that becomes a rose. And he just basically makes the

6:48same point that, you know, it's, it doesn't really add much to what we said here.

Homonomic and heteronomic generalizations

6:52So then I'll talk about these, right. Generalizations. I got into this a little bit, right? So instead of these law-like regularities, we can make these generalizations that relate the physical and the mental. And we do them anyway, right? Within the physical. That's the reason he, although he doesn't talk directly about the idealization, that's why I brought up that point. These are homonomic generalizations, but we think of them as tending towards asymptotically towards some law as we refine them. And we expect them to be finished out

7:30in the same sort of vocabulary, right? So even though we might have some physical law that needs, that we suppose needs further is just a generalization that is subject to further refinement, but we don't expect that refinement to jump over into some other category of vocabulary, like the mental. Heteronomic generalizations though, between the physical and the mental do require different vocabulary for that refinement. Yeah. Just so I'm sure it's probably obvious to most people, but right, we've been talking about

8:02nomological, right? It has to do with laws. So if it's homonomic, homonomic, then, you know, the same, then we can have a law because the things are the same type and they can fit in a law. There's, we can try to make generalizations heteronomically by talking about one vocabulary, vocabulary, you know, is correlated with something from another vocabulary, but those are not going to be sharpenable into a scientific law. And in the case of homonomic generalizations, right, that we're using concepts that are strongly constitutive, he says. So for instance,

8:36he defines this longer than relation. If we want to talk about length and this sort of talk is constitutive of the system of physical objects at the macro level that we encounter. So we would likewise need a kind of theory of intentional states, or we do need that theory in order to attribute propositional attitudes so that a belief will only make sense if it's put into, if it's related to this pattern of other propositional attitudes. And that's when then he

9:09gets into the consistency assumption, right? We need to assume this background of true belief among others, if we're to make sense of their attitudes and their actions. But in the end, we can't just go back to the physical and appeal to behavior. We need a background of attitudes, right? To interpret a behavior, to interpret a statement. This includes, you know, people's interest in consistency and in

9:41the truth and in the good. Those are the types of things that we need in background. And then that'll lead him back to this idea of a heteronomic relationship between the mental and the physical, that is, kind of suffers from an indeterminability of translation, to go back to that paper. There are disparate commitments in these schemes. One scheme is committed to one type of constitutive language, and the other has a different type of constitutive language.

10:12Is it worth dwelling on the homonomic example he gives of length a bit more, or should we just move the hell on from that, right? I mean, I think Wes captured it. There's a great quote that I wrote down from him that sort of says the same thing, that mentions the length. You know, just as we cannot intelligibly assign a length to any object unless a comprehensive theory holds of objects of that sort, we cannot intelligibly attribute any propositional attitude to an agent within the framework of a viable theory of his beliefs, desires, intentions, and decisions. I mean, the conclusion of it all is that there cannot be

10:43tight connections between the realms of each if each is to retain its allegiance to the proper source of the evidence. I think what Mark wants to get into is the LXY and LXZ, then LXZ, the transitivity. Right, Mark? Let's dig in. I mean, even the simplest thing, if you're going to define what length amounts to, well, you have to have transitivity, right? If A is longer than B and B is longer than C, then A is longer than C. You have to have that, but he says like, but that doesn't actually distinguish it from

11:15all sorts of other transitive properties, is more red than, or something like that. So you have to add some empirical content, and he's vague about that, and that's where he brings in the symbols. But okay, so you still have to have this empirical content to understand, and you have to assume that the objects undervation are rigid objects. So if you somehow had something like an emeryl, right, it transforms between an emerald and a sapphire. Well, that creates another bullshit concept, where it is something that is three inches long when viewed before time T and

11:4912 inches long when viewed after time T. Well, that would not be the kind of thing that you could treat as a unit. You could say this changing length thing at time T prime before T was this length, and you could say it is shorter than T prime prime after time T, but you could not just treat it as one object. You have to, the background assumptions is that you're measuring stuff that is not changed while you're measuring it. So his conclusion is that there's something constitutive here,

12:19and law likeness depends on that constitutivity. So he says at the end of the paragraph, it is better to say the whole set of axioms, laws, or postulates for the measurement of length is partly constitutive of the idea of a system of macroscopic rigid physical objects. I suggest that the existence of law-like statements in physical science depends on the existence of constitutive or synthetic a priori laws like those of measurement of length within the same conceptual

12:51domain. So when we talk about these postulates for length and so on and so forth, we are defining this macroscopic physical world. They are constitutive of it, and thus we can get laws out of that. So there's something similar going on within the domain of beliefs, which I think Chris already read about one propositional being attitude, attitude being intelligible only in terms of others. Yeah. But it doesn't cross over to behavior. I feel like we're just repeating ourselves,

13:27yeah. I mean, to me, this whole, yeah, this final section is really just hammering down the way in which the conceptual, I guess they have different structures. They're domains of description that have different constitutive principles and they're not going to end up being translatable. Right. And so that, that really what he's trying to separate these two is like, that's the reason they're incommensurable in that sense. So you're not going to have these laws that bridge them together. They're constituted differently. Yeah. All that's correct. But just to say, why do we have laws within the physical domain? It's because there are these postulates and axioms

13:59that we can specify that are constitutive of it. And then likewise, there's a constitutive function within the mental domain. But the fact that physical vocabulary is not conceptually constitutive of the mental and vice versa means that that lawfulness doesn't cross over between those two domains. And one would have to be constitutive of the other for there to be law likeness between them. Yeah. I think that he says at one point, they have disparate commitments. I can't, I'm trying

14:32to find the quote, but they're just, there's no, yeah, there is no strict psychophysical laws because of the disparate commitments of the mental and physical schemes, right? They're not. Yes. The quote I have highlighted after he says they have disparate commitments is a feature of physical reality that physical change can be explained by laws that connect it with other changes and conditions physically described. It is a feature of the mental that the attribution of mental phenomena must be responsible to the background of reasons, beliefs, and intentions of the individual. There cannot be tight connections between the realms if each is to retain its allegiance

15:02to its proper sorts of evidence. I feel like that is sums up the whole paper, really. Yeah. I mean, that's his response to how we can have this non-reducible, you know, token identity. I guess just this token identity at all. So we still haven't addressed and he doesn't really want to address whether keeping strictly within the realm of the mental, can we have causal laws? He clearly thinks we can't, that we don't, that's not the way we think about it. And maybe that will be, you know, a good, a thought to lead us into the other paper. Yeah. There's a bit in this about how he thinks he proves the identity of the

15:37mental and the physical here, because I don't need to know that we need to state that.

Demonstrating token-token identity

15:41I mean, I guess, all right, let's state the demonstration. This is on page 147 here, which I've just wrote out as numbered steps in the, suppose M, a mental event, cause P, a physical event. Then under some description, M and P instantiate a strict law. Number two, this law can only be physical. And then three, but if M falls under a physical law, it has a physical description, which is to say it is a physical event. So M, it was a memory of my mother and

16:16we're saying it caused me to raise my arm. So then my thinking of my mother, let's just say, okay, am I willing my arm to move? And then my arm moving under some description constitutes a strict law, but then the willing of my arm must also be a way of referring token token to a, you know, this particular instance right now of willing my arm, not in general, all the willings I ever do of my arm, but must constitute a strict, there is a, an event, a physical event that is my willing.

16:48And that physical event is related to P. Right. So otherwise we'd be Cartesians. Right. So I suppose there were not identity and it's just my thoughts. And then there's the brain events and they're correlated in some way, but we know that, you know, Descartes ran into this problem. There is causality between the mental and the physical in one way of speaking. So we have to be able to explain it. And the only way to explain it is to say, oh, well, the mental events are actually identical to the physical because otherwise you are left with the problem of

17:20interactionism. Yep. Okay. He also basically says Laplace's demon, right? We knew everything about the world. You could predict everything physically, but you couldn't be able to do a single mental event, which is a pretty radical claim. Yeah. That seems a bit strong. All right. Next paper.

Reasons as causes in actions

17:36So back to actions, reason, causes from 1963. Again, the whole point is to say that actions are a rationalization, right? Giving a reason why you took an action is a species of ordinary causal explanation, right? It's not merely a re-description. And so the example he gives throughout here, well, he brings up somebody else's example that he brings up several times here that I think we could use is, you know, I'm reaching the intersection in my car and

18:08I want to use the turn signal. And so why, or actually he says, it's the raising of the arm. So let's pretend that we have to reach out the window. Well, what about the light switch? Before blinkers. Yeah. I mean, we could, we, yeah, we might be, that's a little ahead if you guys want to start earlier, but. Okay. I just liked that example. But if you think the light switch is better. Yeah. The question is when you say, you know, he raised his arm versus he is signaling, right? If you say he is signaling, you're saying he raised his arm because he was in the sort of situation where

18:39you do signaling, right? He's at the intersection. He's a law abiding person. He wants to indicate that he's making a turn. So it's a short way saying he is signaling is a re-description that includes the rationalization for the action. It's not merely saying he's raising his arm. Yeah. That's a bit more advanced. I think right in the case of the light switch example, if you flip a, is one token event, which has a number of different descriptions. So there's the flipping of the switch. There's the turning on of the light. There's the illuminating of the room. There's the alerting of the prowler, not four things. He says just one thing under

19:15four different descriptions. And this is important because right. Reasons are going to be causes. I think under only under a certain description. Yes. The alerting of the prowler is obviously dependent on this specific situation that he's setting up. And that's actually, he says his, his problem with these sci-fi examples is that they don't give enough detail. So here's an, you know, we're not just saying turning on the light and all the ways we're saying, turn on the light in an occasion. This sounds like Grice, right? We talked about him on meaning and it always like, well, I have to intend to have you get the information,

19:50but you have to know that I want you to get the information. And so if you just merely overhear me, then you're not really getting the information, you know, or the, uh, justified true belief kind of thing. Like it's these analytic fun time. Yeah. He's going to cause it quasi intentional, right? It has to, it's, it's connected to our description. The reason has to be connected to what we know and what we're, our intentions are. It can't be because we wouldn't want to say, you know, we caused the prowler to be the reason I turned the light on was to alert the prowler or something like that. You know, we want to, I mean, it could be, but the unintentional

20:20alerting of the prowler is not an action for him. So when we say, if we're going to rationalize the flipping on of the light, if we're going to say, I wanted to turn on the light that rationalizes the flipping, but not the alerting of the prowler, right? Or the illuminating. I say, I wanted to turn on the light. I explained, given my reason for, or I rationalize the flipping, but I do not by giving my reason, rationalize my alerting of the prowler nor my illuminating of the room. I don't know about that. Well, I could be, it depends on my intention.

20:53Yeah. That's why I got confused here. So I guess someone just wanted to flip the switch.

21:01So he goes on to say, yeah, right. My reason for flipping the switch was that I wanted to turn on the light. Otherwise we'd be forced to conclude that my reason for alerting the prowler was that I wanted to turn on the light anyway. Okay. It's getting into the weeds. Yeah. He spends a little too much time on this. I think the initial point is made, but then he wants to talk about the logical independent or like the grammatical connection between them, which I didn't care as much about. Propositions. Is it CL? C1?

21:32C1. Yeah. Pro attitude. Someone want to read that? R is a primary reason why an agent performed the action A under the description D only if R consists in a, of a pro attitude, which is not propositional attitude. It's just, you know, I want to do this pro not con pro attitude of the agent toward actions with a certain property in a belief of the agent that A under the description of D has that property. So I have to, I want to do the thing. And then I have to think that doing the thing will achieve what I want. Yeah. So there's a misleading parallel that

22:06crops up because of this, which is that to say I turn on the light, right? Refers to the particular token event. But to say I wanted to turn on the light does not. It refers to a kind of kind of thing. It's general. Yeah. Yeah. It's not tied to that specific physical event or whatever he wants to call you. Is it not? If I intend, if I want to. It's not necessarily. Well, sure, sure. Yeah. You can connect it. It's just, it's not necessarily connected, right? No, no, no. So if I go into the

22:38room and I want to illuminate the room, I don't intend the particular token action. I intend to do a flipping, but a flipping could have any number of different token manifestations. So what I intend is the type and then it results in whatever I end up doing, right? My arm could be slightly to the left a little bit when I flip or slightly to the right. Those are two different tokens that fall under a type. I'm not intending to do this very, very robotically precise thing. Oh, I really wanted

23:12to be three degrees in relation to the light switch and not four degrees. I'm intending a type of action that those tokens are examples of. That's a very important point that he's making here. So we're never intending. Yeah. In fact, this is a great point. He writes, um, if I turned on the light, then I must've done it at a precise moment in a particular way. Every detail is fixed, but it makes no sense to demand that my want be directed at an action performed at any one moment or done in the same unique manner, which is just with that, that he really does want to emphasize that. So that's

23:43important. Yeah. It's a much clearer way of saying that. No, no, you nailed it. I think he's saying all this, uh, contra Anscombe who wants to say that there really is no intention. There's just the turning on the light, but they're to say that they, right. As I turn on the light, I have the sudden intention to turn on the light is just introducing some superfluous ghost that is performing, you know, a mental act that is performing something physical. And she just thinks that is ridiculous.

24:15Whereas Davidson, okay, you're right. We don't have, I want, there's an intention for me to move my finger in exactly this way, but there is a general disposition and maybe the disposition only comes into play at certain times. So it's not like, you know, all uses solubility, right? Something solubility doesn't change, but this kind of disposition could change upon my whim that I just decide right now it is a little too dark in here. And so I want to turn on the light. And therefore I have this disposition. There are also events. I approach the light. I lift my arm.

24:48There are events that lead to, and you could say cause in a different sense by turning on the light, but saying the rationalization, why I did it is one way of saying the cause nothing ghostly about it.

Pro attitudes and practical syllogisms

24:59All right. A primary reason it's a belief and an attitude, right? I want to do the thing. I think that moving my hand in this way will accomplish it. So that's what we're going to do. I want to be rich. So I think buying this lottery ticket will get me rich. Sure. So wanting is a genus covering all pro attitudes. What does that mean? Yeah. Well, I think there was some concern about whether wanting could, was it enough of an umbrella term to capture all instances of mental events? And his use of pro attitude just extends it out,

25:30right? He could just, it doesn't have to just be a wanting. It could be, you know, aesthetic principles, or he gives a bunch of examples, moral value, things like that. So there's no problem with saying that wanting isn't good enough. We can just back out a little bit and say pro attitude. Right. He says, if you say, why'd you do it? And you say, well, for no reason, that means that you just generically wanted, you wanted to do it. You just felt like doing it. We don't have to specify any further. And we accept that that really could be, that's how we interpret. If you say for no reason, because we think of wanting as the umbrella term,

26:02that covers whatever it is that you had a reason. And so you did it. I don't know. I could quibble with that, right? It is morally, there's my child is drowning on one side and six kids are drowning on the other side. And I saved the six kids. Well, why did you do it? Because I wanted to, no, I didn't want to, I wanted to save my own kid, but I did this, but in a sense I did will to, so maybe willing might even be a better term than wanting. I don't know. It's just willing

26:33sounds like an action and he wants this to be a disposition, but maybe this is not interesting. All right. So in 689, we get to the idea, right? The intention, knowing the primary reason is about knowing the intention with which the action was done. And then getting to 690, often saying the intended result is better than saying the intention itself, right? So if you want to do something to soothe the nerves, the soothing of the nerves is the actual result. And then we get to, I think the important part here is the asymmetry, right? So the justification

27:08depends on the explanatory role, but not conversely. So you're stepping on my toes, what's the example here? So you're stepping on my toes, neither explains nor justifies my stepping on your toes, unless I believe that you stepped on my toes, but the belief alone, true or false, explains my actions. Right. Okay. I did have that, pull that in my notes there. So the next section three, right? Well, justification is going to be relevant throughout here, right? That, and maybe this is a, I don't know what Anscombe thought about

27:41this exactly, but if you are saying again, this example that is going to come up here soon, I'm raising my arm because I'm signaling that could be a justification, right? Why did you raise your arm? Well, I was signaling it's a normal action, but that is not, it's totally different than saying my wanting to signal caused me to raise my arm or that, you know, certainly the normal efficacy of signaling caused my arm to go up. Like nothing like that is the case. So justification

28:12and causality are different things, obviously. In section three, you know, we're going to get to this point where just because reasons justify and they do justify, they live in that domain, doesn't mean that they can't also necessarily be causal. This is on 691, which is the standard view. Yeah. I mean, this was a big deal from what I understand from the paper, but just that he sort of wants to attack the idea that what we're doing is, you know, making sense of, or justifying, or making coherent our behavior. We're giving a sort of description, an explanation of behavior.

28:42And that's all that reasons are doing. They're not involved in this causal picture. And he wants to give examples why that's not going to be enough, where you can't just have it be coherent because obviously there are going to be multiple ways in which a behavior could be coherent, but there's a way in which what actually happened is tethered to the actual event. Like we can talk about the arm example where you signal or whatever. I've heard an example where someone says that essentially, let's say the person's going up and they're doing the signal, but what happens is they at the, in coincidence, at the exact same time, they throw their arm up and it looks like they're signaling,

29:13but really they're swatting at a bug or something like that. And it's sort of like in coincidence, they seem to be having the same behavior that we would say there's a difference between him signaling and him swatting at the bug. We'd give the reason. And that would be what caused him to put his hand up was him swatting at the bug. So there is a way in which the causal picture comes into play. It's almost smuggled in already because there's a way in which he did act in a way in which he didn't, I guess is what I'm saying. Right. There are many reasons why you might perform an action and you might even be wrong or misrepresent which reason caused you to do that. It might be

29:45over-determined that he both wanted to signal and coincidentally swatting a bug at that moment would bring his hand into the signaling position. But which one of those was the cause? I don't know. I mean, yeah, sure. But presumably there is one which cuts against the idea that these are ways of redescribing and explaining and they're not there to give a causal picture, right? They're just there to rationalize or make coherent the behavior when that can't be all that's happening because we can think of, you know, clearly we can point out that we can point to reasons as a cause, I guess. So how does this hook up with the other paper that if you were, again, you had that double

30:21reason to raise your arm at that moment? Well, and so there's a legitimate causal, let's say, you know, you raise your arm because you wanted to signal. Wanting to signal has to in some sense be a physical event and then is wanting to swat the bug, would that have to be the same physical event or would that be a different physical event? If in fact, you know, whatever the physical event is that we don't, again, I'm not even sure what my own motive was, but there definitely was a physical event that caused me to raise my arm. It seems like I'm adding some layers of confusion here.

30:54It's not so clear to me. Yeah. Saying he wanted them both at the same time. It's a little, I'm just thinking, thinking through what that would mean exactly. It's a lot easier to think about as like, he wanted one or the other, even if you're wrong about what the reason you give or whatever, presumably there is a intelligible reason that corresponds with, or has a token identity with the physical event. So, right. So the combined reason should have a token identity with the physical event, both by having these two things together. But does that mean the physical event itself can be broken into two pieces? And this is the part of the physical event that was

31:26my wanting to signal. And this is the particle of the physical, probably not right. That that's not the way, but if I'm just unclear about how this token token identity works, maybe this does come back to his other paper of how you pick out an individual event. What is this event? Given that there are so many descriptions of it that we could give, you know, we want it to be one event. I think he, there's a little bit about that in this paper, right? Something about, he gives a number of examples of indicating an event and how we, I, we specify one. Yeah. I mean, isn't there one event

31:59which under one description is a cause and under, right under the physical description is a cause and under the mental description is a reason. Isn't that kind of the upshot and how it, I mean, I guess that what I'm getting at is there might be multiple mental descriptions and there might be multiple physical descriptions, right? You could give it in terms of the atoms and the molecules. You could give it in terms of the cells or the muscles or any of this other. Yeah. That is a complication that he doesn't get into. So yeah. Which thing is it correlated to? It seems like one event could be

32:33correlated to a range of physical events. And so you have to somehow say, if you're going to say there is a, that the physical is a closed causal system that you have to say that, because it seems like just like the physical and the psychological are different language games, the biological and the physical are different language games, even though they can be translated. Yeah. This is a complication he doesn't address. I mean, there would be pluralistic in that sense. The levels and their relations of emergence potentially between even different physical levels. Yep. And non-reducibility. I mean,

Causal efficacy of reasons

33:07that's a real problem. That is, yeah. But do we think that insofar as some of the section three is to say, it's not sufficient to say that giving a reason is just placing your behavior in a coherent logical space or making sense of your behavior or telling a story about what occurred, that that isn't enough to capture all instances of reasons, because there's no way to figure out which of those pictures, coherent pictures actually applies. I mean, that's still cuts the right way, right? Where he wants to go, even if it's more complicated about the multiple descriptions. Like, does that make

33:41sense? Like that point of this section to me is that he's saying, it's not enough to say it's just rationalizing our behavior or making our behavior coherent or putting it in a pattern because we could be wrong about that pattern, which seems to think that there's a way that it's tethered to the event still physically. Like there's still a connection there. You know, you could just be wrong about, does that make sense? So that still seems to be the case. So it's not that we're just blindly determined to do things through physical laws. And then then after the fact at an epiphenomenal level, we re-describe that blind determinism as reasons.

34:16Is that right? Yeah, we don't do that. But there's some sense in which the reason itself is legitimately causal. It's a bit confusing. Yeah. It refers to the cause under a different description. Yeah. I guess. I mean, Mark, does any of that sound right to you? Yes. Yes. Let's move on to some practical syllogisms, right? The beginning of a whole new area of esoteric philosophy stuff. But I guess Anscombe was drawing more directly on Aristotle where you have these practical syllogisms. He gives the example, dry food is good for every man. That's the first premise.

34:49I am a man. That's the second premise. Therefore, so it's not even therefore I should eat the food. It's it actually leads directly to the action. And Davidson just wants to point out that that's not actually what happens, that there are lots of reasons why. So we brought this up before. I'm a man. Dry food is good for every man. We should add an indefinite number of additional and I Aristotle should be fine with this. There are dry goods there. I know that these dry goods are safe to eat. They're bona fide. I bought them from a reputable source. And then what is the background in

35:23determining what a reputable store that is not going to sell me poison, etc., etc. So we're going to have indefinite things. So is that enough to say, actually, Aristotle's right. You know, there's nothing actually that he's already building in this coherence of, you know, desire within a bunch of other propositional attitudes. So this is a 690 to 691. To practical syllogisms? Yes. It's the beginning of number three here. Premise of a solution from which it follows the action has some, yeah. Ms. Anscombe. Desirability,

35:54characteristic. You're talking about that? Yes. There is a certain irreducible, though somewhat anemic sense in which every rationalation justifies. From the agent's point of view, there was, when he acted, something to be said for the action. So this sounds like, right, this sort of Kantian, Sartrean, Nietzschean, whenever you do anything, you are positing it as a good. You are, right, that's straight from Aristotle. I mean, I could just keep reading. Noting that non-theological causal explanations do not display the element of justification provided by reasons, right? So you hit a billiard ball. It's not like

36:25the second billiard ball hit a reason to, you know. Some philosophers have concluded that the concept of cause that applies elsewhere cannot apply to the relation between reasons and actions, and that the pattern of justification provides, in the case of reasons, the required explanation. So it does sound like giving reasons is a different language game than ordinary physical causality. So therefore, it's not causality at all. They're different structurally, it would be that, yeah, or at least, and I think he wants to say that they do seem that way when they're described, but he's going to say the different level of

36:57description is going to be relevant here. Yes. So we've already revealed that via the other paper, that you're right. If you describe the mental event, the lifting of the arm in a purely mental way, then maybe it does not strictly, well, he still wants to say it is a cause of the action. It's just not a law-like cause of the action. So this is a subtlety that he does not get into in this paper. Yeah, it's tough. I can feel the tension every time I say it, you know, like this, this reason caused this, but then we know, we're talking about different description levels, but then, yeah, to what extent did it actually cause? He seems to want to bridge the gap, but say there's a gap

37:30sometimes. Um, so I get a little, yeah. I mean, it seems to me, and I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's, there's a mental state corresponding to a reason and then the mental state corresponding to the willing of the thing that you have the reason to do. And then those are two mental states related by an actual reason. Let's just put it that way. Yeah. And then they correspond to two brain states, which are related causally. Yeah. But where's the talk in here of willing? I'm giving my own example here.

38:02Okay. All right. Because I think it reduces some of the complication and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm, this isn't the way he wants to think about it, but yeah, if we're doing some, the complication is that if we jump to action, we're talking about the physical body, right? But the action itself at a mental level is accompanied by willing. It's accompanied by some mental state that says, I'm going to do this now. And that is distinct from the reason. So I have reason, you know, I want to eliminate the

38:32room. I have a reason to turn on the light switch. It doesn't mean I'm going to do it in all circumstances. There might be a prowler and there might be a reason not to, but if I do do it, that there's a new mental state there that involves that. So the way I'm trying to understand this is in terms of a causal relationship between the mental state of having a reason and then the mental state of willing, and then the actual physical action, right? We can give a physical causal chain there

39:03such that we can say that the reason and it's under its physical description was the cause of the action, which is right. Only has a, well, does the action, an action is a complicated thing actually. Does it include the intention? Anyway, that's, that's what I'm talking about willing. Let's just talk about the physical, I'm talking about the physical act. So I might be teasing apart two things that he's combining in action, but anyway, right. We can give a chain from the physical correlative reason to

39:33the actual physical act of flipping, let's say. And then the ultimate conclusion is going to say, oh, see, look, my reason was a cause because I can look at the reason under a physical description under which it's obviously causal. That seems to me to be what he's saying. So correct me if I'm wrong about that, but also it does seem a little fishy, right? Because we have to jump down to that physical level of description before it becomes a cause. So the only reason I think on Wittgensteinian

40:05grounds to posit willing as a distinct mental event from the doing of the action is in cases where willing fails. I wanted to move my arm. I willed my arm to move. Ha ha. You gave me a paralytic a few minutes ago and my arm did not move. Then I can clearly say, I mean, I willed it, but it didn't happen. Whereas does that mean the fact that you can insert that additional mental event that in the ordinary case where it's successful, that there is an additional mental event. So an exactly precise

40:37analogy, one of the things brought up in these Davidson lectures is this thing about perception that we've often discussed, right? John Searle's whole book that we read was, we don't perceive our own images of the world. We just perceive the world. But then you say, well, what if you get the world wrong? What if you're having an optical illusion? Well, in that case, we do want to say, what I perceived was some intermediary that I then interpreted as being of the world, but yet, you know, it wasn't, it failed in this circumstance. And so it's, it's easy for

41:11many philosophers, all the ones Searle was attacking, which Davidson also wants to attack those people as saying, there always is this mental thing in between us and the world. And I think throughout Davidson following, you know, along the same lines as Searle wants to say that there is no, please do not add additional mental entities between intentions and actions, for instance. No, look, it's, you can ignore it if you don't think it's helpful. But my point is an action is a hybrid thing. Yes. Which he admits in this paper. Yes. It's partly mental. It's partly physical,

41:46which complicates this account. It's partly mental because an action, right, is something that implicitly has an intention connected to it. But it is also a physical act out there at a physical level in the world. So what I'm trying to do is to tease apart, right? Take this hybrid thing and tease it apart. And the only reason I'm doing that is just for the purposes of understanding, not for making a philosophical argument of one kind or another. So ignore it if it doesn't help. But is he, my question here, I mean, is it, do you understand this intuitively? Does it seem

42:20plausible intuitively that we can call reasons causes just because we can think of them under the physical description? Because my point is that under the physical description, what they're causally related to primarily is other physical events, which is why I want to bring in willing because the intention part of action, it also must be given a physical description before we can make sense of the causality. Like a pro attitude would need a physical description, right? Yes. Yeah, that's the

42:52kind, yeah, which totally makes sense. Willing, that makes sense to me that it would also need its own correlate as well. Yeah. Yeah. I see why we're trying to reduce to the physical because that was the point of the other paper and you don't have strict nomological causality unless you have the physical. But I think in this paper, he is defending the thing that, you know, he didn't talk enough about in the other paper is mental on mental causation. So you're right that an action is a hybrid of a physical activity, the moving of the hand, but essential to it being an action is that it was done for this purpose. And under this description, if it was merely a reflexive moving of the hand or

43:26whatever, even if I intended to, okay, so I'm coming to the stoplight. I intend to signal, but I don't actually remember to signal, but you know, there's, I have to have a reflex action and I end up signaling anyway, that's not the action. So it has to be that it's the mental intention has caused the mental or, you know, composite thing that is the action. So I think here, he does not want to reduce everything to the physical, even though you clearly can. Okay. This is good. I think that's

43:57helpful. Yes. Well, is it helpful? I mean, it was helpful for a moment. It was helpful. How do we put these papers together is the problem we're running into? Yeah. Leaving it composite actually makes it seem, does seem to make it more plausible, right? If we have a mental reason and then the action is hybrid thing, I think we're reaching the end anyway. At most five more minutes here and we still had

Addressing objections to causal reasons

44:21another eight pages. So I liked some of these, but he kind of goes through and sort of anticipate some refutations. But I mean, the first one, right at the beginning of, of section four is just the sort of, he talks about states and why you might think that some people might think that beliefs and attitudes are states or dispositions. And so, and they, so they can't be causes because causes are dynamic and active and mechanical. They're part of the flow of the event or whatever. And so I thought of states as like being tall, you know, or like the example of a plate having a hidden crack. And so we're fine saying that I got hit in the head because I was tall or I, the plate cracked

44:56because of, it was of its structural integrity. I think he used the example of a bridge and then someone else might come along and say, well, that still had a kind of dynamic spark happen to it. The bridge had cars running over it or, or you, you ran hot water over the plate or whatever. And so Davidson's going to say, well, our perceptions and mental events are actually dynamic, causal, mechanical events. So we're, there still is, I mean, having a perceptual episode is going to affect your state, your beliefs, your dispositions. And so he thinks it's fine and there's no problem there.

45:26Yeah. I think that's a very straightforward response to that. Yeah. Yeah. The logical connection one was tough. Objection two was tougher for me insofar as it was saying that the structure of causality, they needed to be logically separable, the cause and the effect. And well, this is kind of what I was getting related to my confusion. Does the action, doesn't it include the reason? The objector is saying the reason isn't logically distinct from the action. Yeah. How does he respond to that? What I took as a response is that the description you're correct

46:00can't be logically distinct because we're at the level of mental description. We don't have that nomological character. So we can't, it's sort of a hole there, the reason and the action that you took, they're like connected, but on the causal level, they're still separable. The event of having the, like you said, the pro attitude and then the event of doing the action, they're still separable in the event. They're just not separable in our higher level description. But I don't, I couldn't tell if I was right about that. I think that sounds right. And it's, and he uses analytic and synthetic here, right? Yeah. They're synthetic at the level of description of cause. No, no, that's animal.

46:37No, actually I'm getting this confused now. I think synthetic was right there where there's analytic is that they're. Yeah. Analytic is. Is basically going to be the mental thing where we're talking about, like they're necessarily tied to each other. If I went to the fridge because I'm hungry, the action of going into the fridge is only an action by virtue of having a reason that I'm hungry, which suggests that it, like, as this objector is saying that the action includes the being hungry. So then how can you say that being hungry caused the action? Okay. So maybe

47:08what he's saying is that, yeah, at the level of mental description, that's true. And what we have as a reason, but at the other level of description, it's causal. I don't know. Well, he wants to say that a lot of times when we describe something, we describe it in terms of its cause. So I might even describe you as the offspring of your parents or something like that, but that doesn't mean that you and your parents are not logically distinct. Even if I call you, well, I call you bastard or whatever, that's, that's a short way of saying you're the offspring of

47:41unmarried parents. So yeah, re-description does not rule out causal explanation is the point. And then for C, this is the kind of thing we've already addressed in the mental events. Yeah, this is kind of paper. Someone could say that causes require laws and reasons don't, right? Reasons are singular connections. And then he's going to give his two different, right? It's, there's a law-like connection under one description, but not under the other. Yeah. We're perfectly fine saying the, we're certain saying the rock broke the window,

48:11but even if we don't know all of the underlying physical laws, we don't need to know those. We can still describe the rock pink in the window and be fine. Yeah. Yeah. So we can, then I, that was my kind of banana example at the beginning of the first part of the episode. We can have one-off causal attributions without there being a law at that level of description. And then without knowing the law, the underlying laws, if we wanted to get more granular into the physics of it, but there's still a one-off causal thing. And that's what can happen between reasons

48:43and actions, right? We can have token mental causation without nomologicality, nomologicality. We don't need the nomological correlation. Without laws. Yeah, without laws. So fourth objection is does knowing one's own reasons, does this affect whether or not they do, they do not cause the actions they rationalize. So in other words, right, we've already sort of brought this up. You could have lots of reasons. You got to have lots of motives for doing something. You might not know which one made you act. And I think this is just the difficulties that

49:16just the fact that you don't always know what the cause is, doesn't mean there is no cause. Yeah. It doesn't follow. There's no cause. Yeah. You could just be wrong about yourself or whatever, but even on the mental level, right? That's why we have Freudianism. Freudianism, we have unconscious. You might have desires that you are not aware of, or, you know, you might be unclear about how you're prioritizing your reasons and you don't have to go down to the physical level to, to engage in that kind of causal talk. And the last one, should we talk about causes of actions at all? So it seemed like maybe this, if you really are a strong Wittgensteinian,

49:49these are just different. The justification game, the explanation game, and the causal game are just different things. And so just don't even talk about actions being caused because then you would be veering into determinism and we want you to have your freedom. You want, but Davidson is not sympathetic with this concern. Like we tend to assume, at least in the arena of action that cause demands, sorry, why on earth should a cause turn an action into a mere happening and a person into a helpless victim, right? If do you say you, you know, I did this because I wanted to, oh, well then

50:22your action just happened. He says, do we think that this makes you a victim? Because we tend to assume in the area of action that a cause demands a causer, an agency, an agent. And he says, you know, some causes have no agents, right? Those such as those states and changes in persons, which because their reasons as well as causes make persons voluntary agents. Yeah. He's going to say when reasons cause actions, that's what it is to be free. That's what it is to be, you know, yeah, which is just Aristotle again, right? That you don't have to say what made you an agent. Oh,

50:54that thing for God forced you to be an agent. God is therefore causing everything. And you're just part of the causal web. Like that's silly. All right. Well, a very unconventional and, you know, analytic voice in some of these very familiar free will mind, body problem sort of thing. So having this Wittgensteinian, this language bent on it is a refreshing, if a little frustrating perspective to bring in here. But I found this, you know, I kind of, I don't know if I'd go so far to say I want

51:25to read more of his essays on actions and events, but I'm at least curious about more aspects of his worldview. Let me put it that way. Any other closing thoughts?

Reflections on analytic philosophy

51:33Nope. I thought I enjoyed the mental events paper more than this one. This was, was quite difficult, but it's analytic, but it's, yeah, it is very helpful. I can't say once again, the reading analytic philosophy is my favorite thing to do, but I feel always improved by it. I agree on the, getting on the other side of the reading is always nice, but that, you know, it's very similar to working out in that sense where I'm, it's, it can be tough to, especially analytic philosophy for some reason. But yeah, I enjoyed it too. I, like I said, I'm sympathetic to some of this, you know, what's sometimes understanding like different descriptions as being epistemically

52:06autonomous, you know, like they're separable and they're not translatable. And I like that kind of idea in the philosophy of science. And he seems to sort of be a precursor to some of that. So that was cool to, to read about. And, and it was just, it's just cool to get back into analytic philosophy and stuff. I hadn't read that in a while. I wish I had had this before. I did this review once of Fodor's book where he argues that against evolution, because there aren't any covering laws. You don't get any, because it just involves all this one-off causality, which I thought was a ridiculous argument. So it's not inherently scientific, right? Because you don't get law-like

52:40causality, which, yeah. I don't think that was Fodor. I think that was what it's, Nagel. No, I, I did a review of both books. So Nagel's book was Mind in Cosmos, which I savaged for being Aristotelian. Okay. Now I'm more like final, he's advocating final causes and I'm actually, I don't believe it, but I'm still, I'm more sympathetic now. And then I, Fodor's book was about Darwin and I was just baffled by it and I was critical of it, but I didn't have this like Davidsonian apparatus to use in my critique to say, no, there is one-off causality and it's perfectly scientifically

53:15respectable. Yeah. All right. Well, whatever your motives, thanks for joining us, Chris. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be, excited to read Dennett. Yes. So we'll talk to you next time for that. I'm excited not to re-read Dennett. We'll, we'll, we'll see. That's right. Enjoy your vacay. See what we are going to be up to when Wes comes back. Thanks everybody. Yeah. You should let us know, PL at partiallyexaminedlife.com, what you want us to cover. Interact with us on Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Good night, everybody. Good night. Good night.

53:46Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night. Good night.