Random Notes on Davidson's "Mental Events"

The essays of Davidson referred to in these notes are collected in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events Oxford University: 1980

An analogy for the relationship between the mental and the physical

Here is an analogy to the relationships between the mental and physical in virtue of which Davidson says that we can sensibly postulate identity even though we should not expect laws to link mental events (i.e., events described by means of mental vocabulary) and physical events.

Imagine an institution in which people fill positions in a hierarchical structure--e.g., a college. The president can be identified by means of a physical description--color of eyes and hair and weight and height--and so can the dean for academic affairs, the dean of students, and so on through the first cook, the second cook, and to the security guards, and finally to the various teachers. Even though each officer bears a physical description, by means of which we no doubt distinguish him from others, it would be miraculous for a general law to hold which related general physical characteristics to officeholders--e.g., which held that a person's relative places in the hierarchy was lawfully connected to his relative hairiness, the president having the greatest quantity of hair, the security guard having much less, and the various teachers (arranged by seniority) the least of all.

Given the two sets of vocabulary by which individuals in the institution might be identified, we would be able to say things like this: the president's leg was caused to be broken by someone's dropping the dean of students from a second floor window upon him (as a "prank" during a fraternity "toga party"). In speaking of "cause," we do of course imply that there is a law-like statement linking classes of events of the two sorts; but we should not expect the vocabulary of the law to be that of the institutional offices, but rather to be formulated solely in terms of the weight of a dropped body and the density of bone of the body on whom the first body is dropped. The law, in other words, won't show a lawful relationship between deans' being dropped on presidents and subsequent injury to the presidents, but between a body of a given weight being dropped from a given height upon a person with a certain density of bone and subsequent trauma to his bones--i.e., entirely using the physical vocabulary. Although it will be true that if Dean X is dropped from the second story on President Y, Y's femur will be crushed, it will not be true in general that any dean dropped on any president will cause the president's femur to be crushed, since that will depend on the physical characteristics of the individuals who happen to be these officers.

Problems with Davidson's token-token version of the identity theory

There is a problem with Davidson's version of the identity theory: since his token-token version cuts a true statement of identity off from the general claim that types of mental events are associated with types of physical events, he seems to have no way in principle to establish such an identity. Although he allows that mental events have a location, they are said to have merely the broad location of the actor's body (see page 176, "The Individuation of Events"). As a result, one won't be able to choose between two neurological events which occur at the same time as the mental event and which have different locations in the brain as the physical event to be identified with the mental event.

Davidson also says that if x=y, then x has the same causes and effects as does y.

(On page 179 of his Essays on Actions and Events , in Essay 8, "The Individuation of Events," Davidson says "events are identical if and only if they have exactly the same causes and effects. . . . If we claim, for example, that someone's having a pain on a specific occasion is identical with a certain complex physiological event, the best evidence for the identity is apt to be whatever evidence we have that the pain had the same causes and the same effects as the physiological change. Sameness of cause and effect seems, in cases like this one, a far more useful criterion than sameness of place and time.")

To use this as a means of determining whether x and y are identical, we will have to ask whether the cause of x is identical to the cause of y; but since the cause of x and the cause of y might well be described respectively in mental and physical vocabularies, we would have to have settled beforehand the question of their identity before we can settle the identity of x and y, and doing so would have raised the same problems as those we hoped to solve.

It is worth noting that outside philosophical discussions, the discovery that events described in two distinct ways belong to classes which are the same is often our chief evidence that these two events are the same. When police examine two terrorist incidents, the similarities in the modus operandi of the two are the evidence that they were committed by members of the same group. Again, suppose that we do not know who the head of a terrorist group is: finding that the orders seem to originate first from town A, next from town B, and next from town C, and discovering that of the various possible individuals, only Ralph seems recently to have been in A, B, and C, is evidence that Ralph might be the leader. If we can establish a general covariation between type A and type B, then finding that x is a member of type A will give us grounds for identifying x with y--which is a member of type B (as contrasted with lots of other individuals which are members of other types than B). This general worry can actually be raised with the Malcolm article which discusses the identity theory in the type-type version.

According to Putnam, on page 482 in his 1994 Dewey Lectures (Journal of Philosophy, vol. 41, Sept. 1994), Quine's "Events and Reification," in E. Lapore (ed.), Essays on Truth and Interpretation (Cambridge: 1986) [call number: B105.A35 D373 1985], pp. 161-71 argues that Davidson's criterion for the identity of tokens, that two events are the same if they have the same causes and the same effects, is hopelessly circular; Davidson supposedly concedes the point at pages 172-6.

Putnam summarizes:

"Quine's point is that to tell whether 'token event A' has the same effects (or causes as 'token event B,' one has to know whether they are identical or not--so Davidson's criterion is 'viciously circular.'" (Putnam, 41 Journal of Philosophy, p. 482.) "To see that Quine is right, imagine that we want to decide whether the firing of a small group of neurons ... is or is not "token-identical" with an 'experience of blue.' The firing of the group of neurons will have a host of effects that we would not ordinarily think or speak of as effects of my experiencing blue; for the example, the excitation of other neurons. If the experience of blue is identical with the firing of the group of neurons, then those other excitations are 'effects of the experience of blue'; if, however, the experience of blue is identical with the activity of a larger part of the brain, including the other neurons in question, then those other excitation events will be part of the event that is 'the experience of blue' and not effects of it. There is no way in which one can decide which group of excitation events is identical with 'the experience of blue' by employing Davidson's criterion. We are left with a criterionless and sui generis sort of 'identity.'" (Putnam, Journal of Philosophy, pp. 482-3)

Putnam adds in footnote that Davidson's reply to Quine leans toward accepting Quine's suggestion for a criterion of event identity (same space-time region); Putnam continues "but this is subject to familiar counterexamples, as well as to the problem just noted in connection with the same causes/same effects criterion." Putnam says that we need not be driven back and forth from pillar to post, from mechanism to dualism in this way: "The way out of the dilemma ... requires an appreciation of how sensory experiences are not passive affectations of an object called a 'mind' but (for the most part) experiences of aspects of the world by a living being. Mind talk is not talk about an immaterial part of us, but rather is a way of describing the exercise of certain abilities we possess, abilities which supervene upon the activities of our brains and which do not have to be reductively explained using the vocabulary of physics and biology, or even the vocabulary of computer science." (Putnam, Journal of Philosophy, p. 483)

Yet presumably we need to say how these vocabularies are related to each other: that seems to be the crux of the philosophical difficulties!

Problems about Compatibilism which are unresolved by Davidson

There is a further worry about whether, despite all the interesting and important things we learn in Davidson's sophisticated discussions, Davidson actually advances our understanding of the free will vs. determinism problem. If his identity theory can be worked out, then an important advance would seem to have been made. But consider a set of examples where individuals do something they ought not to have done or fail to do something which they ought to have done, and ask whether Davidson's theory really helps us to understand why we hold some of the individuals responsible and others not:
Ralph is sipping his martini and so is not willing to bother to save a drowning child; Rebecca is chained to the cabaña, and so does not save him; Fred has been manipulated into believing that by the time he swims to the child, the child will already be past saving; Jenny has had recent traumatic encounter with bodies of water and therefore "cannot bring herself" to dive into the water in order to save anyone--even if it were her own daughter; Martin has been manipulated into being disgusted with children--he can scarcely bring himself even to look at a photograph of a child, and so wouldn't seriously consider rescuing one; and Marie is threatened at gun point not to try to save the child. Except for the second case, each of these persons does what he does as a result of his pro-attitudes and his beliefs; and yet it is only Ralph whom we would characterize as having acted freely and as being responsible for the child's drowning. So it is obviously important to the problem to talk about how the person came to have his pro-attitudes and beliefs; the fact that a person's acting was caused by his pro-attitudes and beliefs seems not to settle the question whether he was responsible for what he did. But such things are evidently beyond the scope of Davidson's discussions (see the sentences to which footnote 9 is attached on page 73, "Freedom to Act").

Some notes on Nelson Goodman's discussion of projectable properties

Nelson Goodman: "In order to infer the consequent of a counterfactual from [its] antecedent ... and a suitable statement of relevant conditions . . . , we make use of a general statement . . . the generalization of the conditional . . . For example, in the case of
If the match had been scratched, it would have lighted
the connecting principle is
Every match that is scratched, well made, dry enough, in enough oxygen, etc., lights.
But notice that not every counterfactual is actually sustained by the principle thus arrived at, even if that principle is true. Suppose, for example, that all I had in my right pocket on VE day was a group of silver coins. Now we would not under normal circumstances affirm of a given penny P
If P had been in my pocket on VE day, P would have been silver,
even though from
P was in my pocket on VE day
we can infer the consequent by means of the general statement
Everything in my pocket on VE day was silver.
On the contrary, we would assert that if P had been in my pocket, then this general statement would not be true. The general statement will not permit us to infer the given consequent from the counterfactual assumption that P was in my pocket, because the general statement will not itself withstand that counterfactual assumption. Though the supposed connecting principle is indeed general, true, and perhaps even fully confirmed by observation of all cases it is incapable of sustaining a counterfactual because it is remains a description of accidental fact, not a law." (Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Bobbs-Merrill: 1955; 1965--second edition), pp. 18-9.) A lawful generalization is accepted as true on the basis of some of its observed instances (some others remaining to be determined), the further cases being predicted to conform to it. The accidental generalization, on the other hand, is accepted as a description of contingent fact after the determination of all cases, no prediction of any of its instances being based on it. (Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, p. 20) The difference seems to be that it is legitimate to project to the unobserved cases from the observed ones in the case of a law, but not in the case of a mere true generalization: finding that one coin in my pocket is silver does not support the inference that the others are also silver. "A sentence is lawlike if its acceptance does not depend upon the determination of any given instance." (Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, p. 23) An single observed instance does lend confirmation to a lawlike sentence but not to a mere generalization.