Anomalous Monism - Arguments Against AM and Replies

Arguments Against AM and Replies

Ted Honderich has challenged the thesis of anomalous monism, forcing, in his words, the "inventor of anomalous monism to think again". To understand Honderich's argument, it is helpful to describe the example he uses to illustrate the thesis of AM itself: the event of two pears being put on a scale causes the event of the scale's moving to the two-pound mark. But if we describe the event as "the two French and green things caused the scale to move to the two-pound mark", then while this is true, there is no lawlike relation between the greenness and Frenchness of the pears and the pointers moving to the two-pound mark.

Honderich then points out that what we are really doing when we say that there is "no lawlike relationship between two things under certain descriptions" is taking certain properties and noting that the two things are not in relation in virtue of those particular properties. But this does not mean they are not in lawlike relation in virtue of certain other properties, such as weight in the pears example. On this basis, we can formulate the generalization that Honderich calls the Nomological Character of Causally-Relevant Properties. Then we ask what the causally relevant properties of the mental events which cause physical events are.

Since Davidson believes that mental events are causally efficacious (i.e. he rejects epiphenomenalism), then it must be a mental event as such (mental properties of mental events) which are the causally relevant properties. But if we accept the first two claims of the argument for AM, along with the idea of the causal efficacy of the mental, and the Principle of Causally-Relevant properties, then the result is a denial of anomalous monism because there are indeed psycho-physical lawlike connections. On the other hand, if we wish to retain the principle of the anomalism of the mental then we must reject causal efficacy and embrace epiphenomenalism.

Davidson has responded to such arguments by reformulating anomalous monism and has defended the improved version in Thinking Causes. He points out that the defect in the so-called epiphenominalism problem lies in its confusion of the concept "by virtue of" (or necessary for) with the idea of an event's being responsible for another. Also, Honderich's example of the pears and the scale is jerry rigged in such a way that only a single effect is taken into consideration: the alteration on the scale. But the action of placing pears on a scale can have many different effects; it can attract the attention of a customer, for example. In this case, the causally relevant properties would be precisely the color, shape and other irrelevant properties of the fruit. What is relevant or irrelevant therefore depends, in part, on the context of explanatory interest.