Anomalous monism and epiphenomenalism: A reply to Honderich

Abstract

HE fate of Davidson's version of the identity theory is an important enough issue for it to be worth commenting on Ted Honderich's brisk note 'Anomalous Monism: Reply to Smith' (ANALYSIS 43.3, June 1983; for the preceding debate see Ted Honderich, 'The Argument for Anomalous Monism', ANALYSIS 42.1, January 1982 and Peter Smith 'Bad News for Anomalous Monism?', ANALYSIS 42.4, October 1982). The key argument of Honderich's original paper, as I read it, started from the premise (A) that the anomalous monist is committed to saying that it is, in a phrase, 'the mental as physical' which causes a given behavioural upshot. In other words, it is in virtue of the event's physical properties that a mental event causes a given action. So, since our monist maintains that (B) there are no nomological links between a thing's mental and physical characteristics, it follows that (C) there are no nomological links between a mental event's mental properties and its causal physical properties in virtue of which it produces a certain upshot. So, on the monist's view, it seems to follow that (D) it is a mere accident that an event which has the mental characteristic of being a desire, for example, should have the causal power to bring about the action which commonsense psychology would say the desire produced. And this conclusion, I would agree, is intolerable, and runs counter to our ordinary presumptions about the efficacy of the mental. In my reply, I accepted (A) and (B) for the sake of argument, and attempted to block this reductio of the Davidsonian position after stage (C). That is, I argued that our monist can insist that there is a good sense in which it is not an accident that a particular mental event, identified as such, has the physical causal powers it does have, without being committed to reinstating the unwanted psycho-physical laws. Honderich, however, finds my labours to be beside the point: