2 - Functional Support for Anomalous Monism

Summary

Introduction

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at'best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism.

At first sight functionalism might seem to support the monism but be antagonistic to the anomalism. For a basic idea of functionalism is that the normative rational patterns of folk–functional explanations are mirrored by purely causal inter-relations between the physical states which realize the beliefs, desires, etc. of a folk-explanation. Hence those rational patterns find not just an ‘echo’ but an exact image in physical theory.