Philosophical Review

Anomalous Monism and the Problem of Explanatory Force Author(s): Louise Antony Reviewed work(s): Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 153-187 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185281 . Accessed: 13/02/2012 12:13
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The PhilosophicalReview, Vol. XCVIII, No. 2 (April 1989)

Anomalous Monism and the Problem of Explanatory Force* Louise Antony

INTRODUCTION

oncern about two problems-quite central to action theory

through the work of

and the philosophy of mind-runs Donald Davidson. They are:

A) the problem of characterizing the "because" in explanations of human actions given in terms of the agent's reasons for acting; that is, the problem of analyzing the explanatory force of "rationalizations,"1 and B) the problem for any materialist conception of mind posed by the apparent anomalousness of psychological states and events.

*This paper was begun at an NEH Summer Seminar under the direction of Professor Hector-Neri Castefiada at Indiana University. It was completed while I held a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. I would like to thank Professor Castefiada and my fellow seminarians, especially Michael Costa and James Kelly, for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities and the ACLS for their support. My thanks also to members of the Triangle Language and Mind Discussion Group, the editors of The PhilosophicalReview, David Austin, David Auerbach, Randy Carter, and Hal Levin. Very special thanks to Joe Levine, who read several million earlier drafts. 'This is Davidson's term in "Actions, Reasons and Causes," for the kind of explanation in question (Davidson, 1980, p. 3). I'm not altogether happy with it, since "rationalization," in one common use, applies to specious explanations, offered by someone either insincere or self-deceptive. Rationalizations are tacitly contrastedwith the "real explanation"-an obviously unwanted connotation in this philosophical context. Dray used the word "rationalization" with just this connotation, and employed the term "rational explanation" to refer to explanations in terms of reasons. (See Dray, 1957.) "Rational explanation," however, has troubles of its own, so I'll stick with "rationalization," which at least makes my terminology consistent with Davidson's. I simply warn the reader to guard against misunderstanding. 153

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Davidson claims to have solved both problems through a unified theory of action and mind expounded primarily in two articles, "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (hereafter "ARC") and "Mental Events" ("ME").2The theory divides into two parts: a causal theory of action, meant to address the problem of explanatory force, and the theory of "anomalous monism," explicitly constructed to handle the second problem-the anomalousness of the mental (or as Davidson terms it, the "anomalism of the mental"). The theory as a whole is intended to cohere with Davidson's background views on semantics and psychology. Following Quine, Davidson believes that both the translation of utterances and the attribution of intentional states (enterprises which for Davidson are simply different forms of the project of "interpretation"), issue in theories that are radically indeterminate. In this paper, I will argue that Davidson's program contains a fundamental inconsistency: that his Quinean metaphysics, while rationalizing the doctrine of anomalous monism, makes impossible a successful response to the problem of explanatory force in terms of a causal theory of action.
I. THE PROBLEM OF EXPLANATORY FORCE

Davidson explains that his main objective in ARC is to counter (what was at the time) the increasingly popular view that explanations of human actions in terms of reasons differed in kind from explanations of events in terms of antecedent causes-the view, in other words, that reasons were not causes. Not only does he believe that the arguments for this view are all seriously flawed, but he thinks that there is a strong argument for the conclusion that reasons must be causes. Only on that assumption, he contends, can we account for the explanatory force of rationalizations. In this section, I want mainly to review and support Davidson's positive case, but I'll begin with an overview of the anti-causalist positions, because of their bearing on aspects of Davidson's metaphysics to be discussed below. The arguments against reasons' being~causes are of roughly two
21 will refer to articles of Davidson's by the abbreviations introduced in the text. All articles are reprinted in Davidson (1980), and page references will be to that volume.

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kinds: methodologicaland conceptual. Arguments of the first kind allege that differences in objectives between the natural and social sciences generate different desiderata for explanatory adequacy. William Dray,3 for example, opposed the "methodological monism"4 behind C. G. Hempel's deductive-nomological model of explanation.5 According to the D-N model, an explanation consisted in the subsumption of particular events under general ''covering-laws." Dray did not challenge the adequacy of this model as an analysis of causal explanation in the natural sciences, but instead disputed its appropriateness for the social sciences. Dray allowed that explanations in the natural sciences seek to account for particular events by placing them within a context of lawful regularity, but argued, following the Verstehentheorists before him, that the goal of explanation in the social sciences is to make individual human actions intelligible in their particularity. The aim, he said, is to show such actions to be reasonable, once considered in light of "what the agent believed to be the facts of his situation, . . . and what he wanted to accomplish."6 The primary constraint on explanations in the social sciences is thus, according to Dray, a normativeone. This makes the existence or non-existence of lawful generalizations relating reasons to actions irrelevant to the acceptability of ordinary rationalizations. Such generalizations, if they exist, would not add anything to the rationalizing power of a specification of an agent's beliefs and desires, and the generalization alone would not serve to make the action appear reasonable. Causal explanations and rationalizations simply explain things in a different way. Methodological arguments such as Dray's, if successful, show only that reasons need not be causes in order to explain actions. The conceptualarguments, on the other hand, are meant to establish something much stronger, viz., that reasons could not be causes. The "logic" of rationalizations, it's claimed, shows that appealing to an agent's reasons is a way of explaining an event fundamentally at odds with citing its cause. This claim is elaborated in
3Dray, 1957. 4The term "methodological monism" was coined by G. H. von Wright. See von Wright (1971), p. 4. 5Expounded in Hempel (1965). 6Dray, (1963), pp. 68-69. 155

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a variety of ways: Anscombe7 argues that a reason is not a separate event from, but merely a re-description of, the action being explained. Others finesse the ontological issue of how many events are involved, but invoke the Humean requirement that causally related events not bear any logical relation to each other.8 It's claimed that since reasons are specified in termsof the actions they rationalize, the connection between an action and its reason is not a contingent one. Another argument on the same theme points to an inappropriate evidential connection between reasons and actions: the presence of a reason cannot be ascertained independently of the occurrence of the action it rationalizes, and thus rationalizations are not subject to experimental test in the way genuinely contingent causal hypotheses are. Anscombe and the others who argue for a conceptual connection between action and their reasons cite-once again-the normativityof explanations of human action as the source of this distinctive feature of rationalizations. Thus: an explanation in terms of reasons only succeeds if it can show the action to be reasonable in light of the agent's beliefs and goals, and the best way to do this is to display the existence of a rational-that is, logical-relation between a specification of the agent's reason and a characterization of his projected action. Thus it is the normativecharacter of rationalization that emerges, from all sides, as the source of the distinctive features of explanation by reference to reasons. Dray, Anscombe, and the others all agree that a rationalization can only be counted an adequate explanation of an action if itjustifies the action, in the sense of showing it to be a reasonable thing to do given the beliefs and desires the agent possessed at the time. In effect, the anti-causalists lay down the following as necessary conditions for an acceptable rationalization:

The Truth Condition-Any attribution of mental attitudes to the agent contained in the rationalization must be true.9
7See Anscombe, (1976). Ryle takes a similar line in The Conceptof Mind. 8See, for example, Melden, (1961) and Ryle, (1949). 9This formulation of the requirement is meant to be neutral about the proper logical analysis of attributions of beliefs and desires, and specifically, about whether such attributions carry ontological commitments to mental entities, sentences, events, or anything else. 156

ANOMALOUS MONISM The RationalityCondition-The rationalization must display the action as being reasonable in light of the beliefs and desires attributed in accordance with the truth condition. I'll refer to the two conditions jointly as the "justification model." But now the question arises whether these two conditions are meant to be sufficient, as well as necessary. Do rationalizations exhaust their explanatory function once these conditions have been fulfilled? Is justification all thereis to explaining a human action in terms of reasons? The answer to this question, Davidson argues, must certainly be "no." If one maintains that justification is all there is to rationalization, then something essential has certainlybeen left out, for a person can have a reason for an action, and perform the action, and yet this reason not be the reason why he did it. Central to the relation between a reason and an action it explains is the idea that the agent performed the action because had the reason. Of course we can he include this idea too in justification;but then the notion of justification becomes as dark as the notion of reason until we can accountfor the force of that 'because'(ARC,p. 9). The problem of explanatory force, then, is the problem of explicating the connectionbetween actions and rationalizing reasons. Davidson thinks that the only way to do this is to treat rationalizations as a species of causal explanation. Only then, he argues, can we turn the first 'and' to 'because'in 'He exercised and he wanted to reduce and thought exercise would do it'. . . (ARC,pp. 11-12). The inadequacy of the justification model, and the rationale for a causal model emerge most clearly when we consider a case in which there are two competing rationalizations for the same action. Consider this one: Hermione is a bright, committed student of philosophy. In any given discussion, she will likely think of several interesting points, which her general love of subject and commitment to intellectual progress will give her reason to express aloud. However, Hermione is also quite insecure and overly dependent upon the good opinion of philosophy professors. She's aware of this neurotic tendency (I want there to be no issue about 157

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subconscious desires) and thus when she's afforded an opportunity to secure a professor's approbation by making some analytical masterstroke, is self-consciously possessed with a desire to make it. Now, in February of 19-, Hermione is in the seminar of one of her most respected teachers, and an especially brilliant comment occurs to her. She raises her hand, is recognized, and exclaims, "But that's just verificationism!" Hermione's contribution is applauded by all, and later that week she is offered a tenure-track position at an Ivy League university. The question before us is, why did Hermione make her remark? On the face of it, there are three plausible answers: either she did it to foster philosophical progress, or she did it to win the approval of her teacher, or she did it to accomplish both these things. Each of the first two answers corresponds to a different rationalization attributable to Hermione: RAT 1) Hermione wanted to foster philosophical progress, and believed that making her remark would foster philosophical progress. RAT 2) Hermione wanted to win the respect and approval of her illustrious teacher, and believed that making her remark would win for her the respect and approval of her illustrious teacher. Both RAT 1 and RAT 2 fulfill the conditions of the justification model: each attributes to Hermione a belief and desire that she in fact possesses, and each shows the ensuing action to be reasonable in light of the attributed belief and desire. It is fully correct to say that she has two distinct reasons ("primary reasons" in Davidson's terminology)10 for performing the action she finally performs. This might seem to favor the third answer: that Hermione acted from both reasons. But although Hermione clearly possessed two different reasons for making the remark, it could be the case that she only acted from one of them. If so, then only one of the two candidate rationalizations tells us the reason why Hermione made
'0As Davidson defines it, a "primary reason" for performing an action A consists in a pro attitude of an agent toward actions with a certain property, plus that agent's belief that a particular action A, conceived under a description d, has that property (ARC, p. 5). 158

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the remark. And here we reach the limits of the justification model: it can tell us why each of these proposed rationalizations is a good candidate explanation, but it cannot tell us which one is the correctexplanation. The anti-causalists might respond by denying that there is a single correct explanation. They might claim that, provided both the rationality and truth conditions are satisfied, each rationalization provides an equally correct account of why Hermione made the remark. This would amount to insisting on the third answerthat Hermione's action was over-determined. But as I indicated above, such a response would be tendentious: certainly Hermione might have acted on the basis of both reasons, but she needn'thave. If it's even possible for a person to act from one reason when she possesses two, then the anti-causalist is in trouble. An appeal to ordinary language is in order here: the everyday sense of "rationalization" applies in just those cases where we reject an offered explanation not on the grounds that we don't accept the agent's claims about what she believes and desires, but rather because we don't believe that those beliefs and desires are the ones "responsible" for the action. ("Of course you want to foster philosophical progress, Hermione, but that'snot why you spoke up.") And on the other hand, it seems to me, human beings are not such pathetically Hobbesian automata that they can't once in a while rise above banal (but omnipresent) self-concern and actfrom loftier motives. ("I know that I am overly fond of the good opinion of others, but I assure you that in this case I spoke purely out of love of the truth.") At any rate, an account of human action and rationalization ought not to rule out at the beginning possibilities such as these. But although the overdetermination response is a poor one, it is the only sort of response open to a committed anti-causalist. For the problem with the justification model is not simply that it doesn't tell us which rationalization is the correct one-it's rather that the justification model offers no account of what being the correct rationalization would consist in. What's needed is some account of how a reason can be efficacious,and "efficacy" is a causal notion. Davidson concludes that rationalization must be regarded as a efficacious species of causal explanation, and that reasons-the ones-must be mental causes. This is not to deny the presence or 159

LOUISEANTONY the importance of the normative component isolated by the anticausalists. Davidson not only agrees that an adequate rationalization must justify the action it's meant to explain, but indeed, as we'll see, lays heavy weight on the normative element himself. Rationalizations are not simply causal explanations, on his view, but they are at least causal explanations. The next step, then, is to answer those who say that reasons cannot be causes. To dismiss the conceptual arguments, Davidson must show that the existence of a logical relation between specifications of reasons and actions is consistent with their being separate events, causally connected. This, Davidson believes, can be done with dispatch. Answering the methodological arguments, on the other hand, turns out to be, for Davidson, a bit more complicated. At issue is whether or not rationalizations need to be "backed" by general laws, as the D-N model requires for causal explanations. If Davidson wants to say that rationalizations are a species of causal explanation, he must either find some general laws relating reasons to actions, or reject the covering-law model of causal explanation. Davidson prefers the first option, but concedes to the anti-causalists that there are no prospects for elaborating ordinary attributions of reasons into fully general laws. Davidson's reasons for this concession are most interesting, and will be examined closely below. For now, it suffices to note that his skepticism about the possibility of laws relating reasons to actions, together with his determination to treat reasons as causes, present Davidson with a problem. His solution is present in all essentials in ARC, but is fully developed and "resolved" in ME, to which I now turn.
II. ANOMALOUS MONISM

The theory of anomalous monism is designed to resolve an apparent "paradox" Davidson thinks is generated by the following three principles: (I) The Principle of Causal Interaction("CI," henceforth)-"at least some mental events interact causally with physical events" (ME, p. 208). (II) The Principle of the Nomological Character of Causation 160

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("NCC")-"where there is causality, there must be a law" (ME, p. 208). (III) The Principle of the Anomalism of the Mental ("PAM") "there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained" (ME, p. 208). The "apparent contradiction" is this: if some mental events causally interact with physical events, then (presumably) some mental events are caused by physical events. If so, then there must be laws underlying the causal connections in these cases. But then, it seems, there would be laws on the basis of which mental events could be explained or predicted, in precise contradiction to PAM. Clearly, this is the problem that confronted Davidson in ARC: CI is entailed by the causal connection between reasons and actions,11 NCC affirms the covering-law model of causation, and PAM expresses the skepticism Davidson shares with the anticausalists about the existence of laws governing mental events. theory of anomalous monism-comprises The solution-the three theses. The first is a token-identity thesis: every mental event (where an event is taken to be an "unrepeatable, dated particular") is token-identical with some physical event. The second thesis asof serts the extensionality singular causal claims: ".... causes "__ denotes a relation that holds between particular events however they are described. The third asserts the intensionalityof predicates relating events to laws, such as "instantiate": the truth of a claim that an event or pair of events instantiates a law will depend upon the description used to pick out the event or events.12
"Davidson carefully notes that one needn't embrace a causal theory of action to accept Principle I: perception-based belief provides as good an example of mental-physical "interaction" as intentional action does. '2The claim, as stated, is admittedly obscure. However, Davidson's own formulation of the third thesis, which I discuss at some length below, is even worse. Nowhere does Davidson make clear exactly what he means in saying that "events can instantiate laws ... only as those events are described in one or another way" (ME, p. 215). The crucial omission is a specification of the right ways to describe events in order to bring them under laws. (As I'll argue below, this omission is even more important when we come to deal with explanation.)On the face of it, the thesis seems false-there seems to be no reason why we can't speak of an event in any 161

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Note that the first two theses alone-the "monistic" part of the theory-would serve to answer those anti-causalists who base their case on a "conceptual connection" between reasons and actions. If mental events are simply physical events described in a particular way, and if causation is an extensional relation that holds between events however described, then the existence of a logical connection between the descriptions of a pair of events is irrelevant to the matter of whether the events themselves are causally connected. It is the third thesis that really does the work of resolving the tension generated by the full complement of Davidson's methodological commitments, and it does this by opening a loophole in PAM. As Davidson formulates PAM ("there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained"-ME, p. 208), the principle strongly suggests that mental events are occurrences altogether outside the scope of natural law-that they are, one might say, anomalous "in themselves." If this were what Davidson meant, then the conflict between PAM and the other two principles would be irresolvable, and the news that mental events are token-identical with lawabiding physical events would make matters even worse. But the third thesis in the theory of anomalous monism is meant to warn us against interpreting PAM in this way. The third thesis asserts that all claims relating events to laws contain intensional contexts. Explanations and predictions, Davidson contends, incorporate appeals to natural law, and are therefore sensitive to the way in which the explained or predicted events are described. In Davidson's own words, "events can instantiate laws, and hence be explained or predicted in light of laws, only as those events are described in one way or another" (ME, p. 215). The question of whether an event is explicable or predictable on the basis of laws must turn, then, not on the intrinsic properties of the event, but rather, on how the event is described. In order for the event to be explained or predicted "on the basis of laws," the event must be picked out by means of some suitable description, preferably, one
old way as being an instance of this or that law.'Why can't I say-truly and correctly-that my falling out of bed was an instance of the laws of gravity? And if the third thesis doesn't rule out descriptions like "my falling out of bed," what in the world does it rule out? The only argument for the third thesis is the single assertion, "laws are linguistic . . ." (ME, p. 215), which serves neither to justify nor clarify the claim. 162

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presumes, a description that utilizes the vocabulary of the law invoked by the explanation or prediction. What PAM asserts to be "anomalous," therefore, must not be the mental event itself, but rather its mentalistic description.And now it seems that PAM is badly overstated. Not only is the formulation extremely misleading in suggesting that the events denoted by psychological descriptions somehow fall outside the natural order, but it fails to express clearly Davidson's real point-namely, that there are no laws expressible in the language of psychology. PAM, therefore, ought to be replaced by, or at least understood as entailing: The Principle of Non-Generalizability ("PNG"): There are no strict deterministic laws formulable in the vocabulary of psychology. Were there such laws, mentalistically described events would be in no sense "anomalous." Presuming Davidson's commitment to PNG, let's look at the complete picture of rationalization presented by the theory of anomalous monism: a rationalization posits a causal connection between a mental event and a physical event. The truth of any singular causal claim entails the existence of a natural law connecting the two events. There are (in accordance with PNG) no laws formulable in psychological terms, but since every mental event is identical with some physical event, every mental-physical interaction is identical with some presumably law-governed physicalphysical interaction. Ordinary rationalizations can thus be counted as causal despite the non-availability of lawful generalizations stated in termsof beliefs, desires, and the like. Those who despaired of ever finding laws connecting reasons and actions, per se, Davidson argues, were laboring under the misconception that such laws would have to use the psychological categories implicit in the attribution of reasons. Instead, Davidson explains: If the causes of a class of events (actions) fall in a certain class (reasons)and there is a law to back each singular causal statement,it does not follow that there is any law connecting events classified as may even reasons with events classifiedas actions-the classifications be neurological,chemical,or physical(ARC, p. 17). The general point is this: not every classification of events groups them into natural kinds. In making singular causal claims, our 163

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simply want to specify the caumain concern is referential-we free to use any mode of designasally related events, and we are tion that works. Justifying the causal claim is another matter. For this we must show that the events picked out fall into some nomically significant classes, but we're not constrained in our efforts by the descriptions we happened on in the first step. To illustrate the point, Davidson bids us consider a catastrophe, reported on page 13 of Wednesday's Tribune,which is the result of a hurricane, reported on page 5 of Tuesday's Times.While it could be perfectly obvious that the event reported on page 5 of Tuesday's Times caused the event reported on page 13 of Wednesday's Tribune, it would be ludicrous to look for a law relating events of thesekinds, and, Davidson continues, "only slightly less ridiculous to look for a law relating hurricanes and catastrophes" (ARC, p. 17). Such are simply not the concepts of real science. But the example raises a concern: while anomalous monism has so far enabled Davidson to defend his claim that reasons are causes, insuring the view against the non-existence of laws governing the class of reasons, we have yet to see how he can justify the very different claim that rationalizations are (as he puts it in ARC) "a species of causal explanation." To see the problem, notice that the anomalous descriptions in the hurricane example are as poorly suited for use in explanationsas in laws. For the same reason that one cannot find laws relating the class of events reported on page 5 of Tuesday's Times to the class of events reported on page 13 of Wednesday's Tribune, one cannot explain the event reported on page 13 of Wednesday's Tribune simply by asserting the truth that it was caused by the event reported on page 5 of Tuesday's Times. Not every true causal statement counts as a causal explanation: for explanation, it's not enough just to pick out the cause of an event-one must pick out the event in a certain way. In other words, the intensionality inherent in laws infects explanations also. If the adequacy of a causal explanation depends not only on the truth of the singular causal claim it entails, but also on the way in which the events are described, fresh questions arise about the implications of PNG for the status of rationalizations. Let us call a description of an event nomicjust in case the description denotes a nomologically significant class. We can then consider the following as a possible condition of adequacy for causal explanations: 164

ANOMALOUS MONISM The Nomic Constraint-a specification of the causal antecedents of an event only counts as a causal explanation of that event if the descriptions of the event and its cause are nomic descriptions. Hempel may have had something like the nomic constraint in mind.13 The condition is certainly in the spirit of the D-N model, and commitment to some such constraint would explain his insistence on the need for general historical and psychological laws. But what about Davidson? Despite certain remarks that suggest that he, too, has such a constraint in mind,14 Davidson does notand cannot-accept the nomic constraint. He cannot accept it because the nomic constraint, together with PNG, immediately entail that rationalizations are not causal explanations-indeed, that they are not genuinely explanatory at all. And it is clearly Davidson's view that, whatever else is true, rationalizations are perfectly legitimate forms of explanation. In "Hempel on Explaining Action," Davidson ascribes to Hempel something very close to the nomic constraint, the view that "in order to explain events we must describe them in a way that reveals how laws are applicable," and voices the following reservation about it: We mayjoin in lauding as an ideal explanation a descriptionof antecedents and a specificationof laws such that the explanandumcan be deduced; but how much less still counts as explanation?It seems to
'3He says in "Aspects" for example, that ". . . the law tacitly implied by the assertion that b, as an event of kind B, was caused by a as an event of kind A is a general statement of causal connection to the effect that, under suitable circumstances, an instance of A is invariably accompanied by an instance of B" (Hempel, 1964, p. 349). Davidson interprets Hempel as endorsing the nomic constraint. (See Davidson, 1980, p. 265.) '4In the original formulation of PAM, for example, Davidson speaks of there being no "strict, deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained," without specifying any other possible bases for the explanation and prediction of mental events. Again, in response to an objection of Attfield's (Davidson, 1980, pp. 241-242), Davidson says that ".... laws (and nomologicalexplanations)do not deal directly (i.e., extensionally) with events, but with events as described in one way or another" [my emphasis]. Davidson does not say exactly what counts as a "nomological explanation," but presumably he means the term to encompass causal explanations, and thus rationalizations. He does not say which ways of describing events work for nomological explanations, but the context suggests it's nomic descriptions that must be used. 165

LOUISEANTONY good specimenfor study;since we me we have in action a particularly agree that one way of explaining actions is by giving the agent's reasons, we can concentrate on the relatively clear question what reason explanationsare like, and set aside the more diffuse problem of characterizingexplanation generally ("Hempelon ExplainingAction," pp. 262-263). Well, then, given the intensionality of explanation, and the truth of PNG, and the legitimacy of unreconstructed rationalizations, what are "reason explanations" supposed to be like? The key to Davidson's unique picture of rationalization is provided, ironically enough, by the anti-causalists, and their emphasis on the normativityof this form of explanation. As I pointed out earlier, Davidson is quite in agreement with his antagonists about there being this element to rationalization; he disagrees only about its bearing on the ontology of the matter. Since Davidson's complaint against what I've called the justification model was essentially that it was incomplete, and not that it was incorrect, we could append that model to Davidson's causal theory of action to get the following model of rationalization as "a species of causal explanation": A Davidsonian Model of Rationalization Conditions on an adequate rationalization: (a) The Truth Condition(as before) (b) The Rationality Condition(as before) and (c) The Causal Condition-the event cited as the reason in the explanans is the cause of the event cited as the action in the explanandum. Hermione's case illustrates the model: we'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that it is RAT 1 ("she wanted to foster
philosophical progress. . .") and not RAT 2 ("she wanted to secure the approbation of her professor . . .") that gives the real reason

for her action. Obviously, RAT 1 satisifes conditions (a) and (b), because it satisfies the justification model. Additionally, condition (c) entails that the following must be true: there exists an event c such that c is identical to the event consisting in Hermione's perceiving an opportunity to foster philosophical progress, and there exists an event e such that e is identical with Hermione's making the remark, and c is the cause of e. 166

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In the picture I'm attributing to Davidson, then, rationalizations explain actions by doing two things: by citing the physical causea physical occurdespite the use of mentalistic descriptions-of rence, and by displaying-through the use of mentalistic descriptions-the action as being reasonable in light of the agent's beliefs and desires. Conditions (a-b) constrain the kinds of ways in which the cause of an action can be picked out in order to get a genuine rationalization, and condition (c) ensures that adequate rationalizations will have genuine explanatory force. It thus seems possible to construct a viable analysis of rationalization as causal explanation consistent with commitment to PNG. However, trouble is just around the corner.
III. THE PROBLEM: PART ONE

The first problem is one that Davidson has been primarily responsible for identifying, although he certainly does not see it as a problem for his view of rationalization. It is this: reasons can cause actions without causing them in "the right way." This is an old chestnut by now in the action theory literature, and examples abound, but I'll borrow one of Davidson's cases to illustrate. A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen to his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally("Freedomto Act,"p. 79). Davidson offers this case as a problem for his analysis of free action, as a problem for his analysis of intentional action, and as one reason why it's probable that there are no empirical laws governing rational behavior. What he doesn't realize is that the case provides an equally intransigent problem for his own analysis of rationalization. Davidson notes that from the fact that there exist attitudes of an agent which both cause an action and are such as would serve to rationalize the action, it does not follow that the agent performed the action intentionally. But by the same token, we can see that a rationalization of the action in terms of those attitudes would be unacceptable as an explanation. In general, for any case involving 167

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a "wayward"causal chain linking reasons to actions, it will be incorrect to offer a rationalizationfor the action, even though both conditions (a-b) and (c) of the Davidson model will be satisfied. Davidson's model of rationalization is clearly missing something: an account of how reasons cause actions so as to rationalize them simultaneously. The explanatory force of rationalizations is partly explained by the fact that reasons are things that have causal efficacy, but we also need to know how it is that reasons can have How can it be that causal efficacy in virtue of their reasonableness.15 the causal potential of a physical event is partly determined by the logical features of one of its descriptions? Davidson's causal account of action is meant to underwrite the explanatory value of an appeal to reasons; but we can see that in fact, the model leaves the rational and causal aspects of rationalization radically detached. Because we are not told how a belief or desire characteristically causes an action that it rationalizes, the entire appeal to the causal antecedents of the action is a red herring. If we are materialists of any stripe, we believe that the physical goings-on in our bodies, and especially in our brains, have something to do with what kind of behavior our bodies display. None of the anti-causalists that I know of denied that there exist true physical descriptions of the movements of our bodies during a period of what could be called intentional action. The question was always, rather, what relevance any such physical description was supposed to have to commonsense explanations of those actions. This is precisely the question Davidson does not answer. Nor, I contend, can he. Making the needed emendations would implicate him in a realism about psychology and the mental directly in conflict with his deep commitment to the Quinean view of matters intentional.
IV. EXPLANATIONS AND LAWS

The first thing to notice is that the problem really is not specific to rationalizations: it can be illustrated by cases that don't even involve intentional descriptions of events..Return once more to the '5Thisway of putting the point was suggested to me byJoe Levine.Jerry Fodor makes this point the main strut of his philosophicalargument for a "languageof thought,"about which I'll have more to say later. 168

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hurricane analogy. Davidson argues that it would be silly not only to look for laws relating events described by reference to page of reportage, but also to seek laws relating "hurricanes and disasters." No doubt Davidson is right about the laws-but what's interesting is that we can get perfectly good explanationsof disasters in terms of hurricanes. An astonished someone surveying the wreckage of a seaside town would be thoroughly ( atisfied to learn that there had been a hurricane there the night before, and this despite the fact that "hurricane" and "disaster" are not nomic terms. I noted above that explanation is intensional-that not just any specification of the causal antecedents of an event will do to explain it-so that an adequate account of explanation must provide some constraints on descriptions that may be used. The nomic constraint is one possibility, and another is the rationality constraint. But neither would legitimate the explanation of a disaster in terms of a hurricane: "hurricane" and "disaster" are not nomic terms, and neither do hurricanes make it reasonable for disasters to have visited themselves upon coastal towns. What does, then, account for the explanatory value of reference to hurricanes? It surely doesn't help to point out, as Davidson seems to think it does, that each individual hurricane and each individual disaster does have some nomic description, because that fact doesn't account for our satisfaction with the explanation in termsof disasters and hurricanes. The same thing can be said of the identities of the event reported on page 5 of Tuesday's Times and the event reported on page 13 of Wednesday's Tribune, but there are no generally acceptable explanations of those events so characterized.16 Thus, the token-identity of a non-nomically described event with a nominally described event cannot be the whole story about the acceptability of ordinary explanations. If we can fill out the story properly for hurricanes and disasters, perhaps we'll gain insight about rationalizations. To begin with,
'61f one knew antecedently that the event reported on page 5 of Tuesday's Times was a hurricane, and were making inquiries of someone who knew that it was a disaster that was reported on page 13 of the Tribune, then the explanation in these terms might be OK. But notice that the acceptability of the explanation depends crucially on the identities being known, and not merely on their being true. And Davidson is quite insistent that the acceptability of rationalizations does not depend upon knowing the relevant psycho-physical identities.

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notice that while "hurricane" and "disaster" are not nomic terms, they do differ significantly from descriptions like "event reported on page 5 of Tuesday's Times"in bringing together events that are non-accidentallyrelated. One can fruitfully inquire what sort of thing a hurricane is, with the intention of finding out how hurricanes cause disasters. If we can understand, even roughly, how things describable in the language of physics can go to make up a hurricane, we can see how the regularities describable in the language of physics can converge to produce the regularities-apparent on the macro level-that we describe in terms of hurricanes and disasters. It's the fact that we can know-even vaguely-what sort of thing a hurricane is that makes relevant the kind of strict, microphysical account of particular causal interactions that Davidson insists upon. Thus, more important than knowing the particular tokenidentities involved in a given hurricane/disaster incident, is knowing, in general, how the nature of hurricanes constrains the kinds of micro-events that can constitute a hurricane (and similarly for disasters). For this to work, "hurricane" must enforce a principled collection of events-there must be something things have in common that makes it true that they are hurricanes, something non-trivial in virtue of which they are hurricanes. This "something" is not going to be a simple function of the "hurrihurricane's physical or chemical composition-otherwise, cane"17 would be a nomic term, and we're supposing along with Davidson that there are no strict laws relating the class of hurricanes to the class of disasters. Rather, the features shared are going to be abstract characteristics-functional or structural properties that any complex of events must display in order to be counted a hurricane. This is, of course, simply the familiar functionalist point that there are regularities that only become apparent when we employ relatively high-level descriptions of objects and events.18 But the recognition that there can be regularities that are neither nomic nor accidental requires us to complicate significantly the picture of laws, causation, and explanation that we've been assuming.
170r some extensionally equivalent predicate, which could be readily translated to "hurricane" through a simple bridge law. '8See Putnam, 1960, for the classic statement.

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ANOMALOUS MONISM In his recent work, The Nature of Psychological Explanation,'9 Robert Cummins points out that there's been a general failure to recognize the difference between two distinct explanatory strategies: subsumptionand analysis. This distinction is orthogonal to any of the distinctions in terms of discipline or subject matter urged by the anti-causalists, accommodating my observation that we have as much difficulty accounting for the explanatory value of appeal to hurricanes as for the value of appeal to reasons. The subsumption strategy is the style of explanation we've been discussing: explaining an event pair by showing the pair to be an instance of some nomic generalization. This strategy is well-suited to the explanatory demands placed upon what Cummins calls "transition theories": theories that are meant to specify the conditions under which particular systems will undergo various changes of state. But the explanation of state transitions by subsumption under causal generalizations is, while important, by no means the only form of theoretical explanation. Even transition theories depart from the D-N paradigm, both by employing laws other than causal generalizations, and by using them for purposes other than the subsumption of individual causal pairs. But more important for current purposes than the complexity of the explanatory structure of transition theories is the fact that there exists a completely different kind of theory, which has associated with it a completely different kind of explanatory strategy. A "property theory" is meant to explain, not how state changes occur, but what it is for an object or a system to have a certain property or to be in a certain state. The strategy here is analytical the theory must say what it is about the composition or organization of the system that makes the system an instantiation or realization of the property. Cummins emphasizes that the kind of laws that do this work -"instantiation laws"- do not license type-type reductions, precisely because a single property may be instantiated in many different ways. And we can see that it is because of the possibility

'9Cummins, 1984. In the succeeding paragraphs, I draw from Chapter I. I cannot begin to do justice to the richly detailed account of the forms of explanation and the variety of laws that is contained in Cummins's book, and so anything in the discussion below that seems crude or overly simple should be assumed to be my fault and not his. 171

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of multiple instantiation that the having of higher-level functional or architectural properties admits of explanation. Since "being a cell" is not simply a matter of having a certain physical or even chemical composition, there is something to learn about how "cell" constrains the range of chemical structures: it constrains them in effect by setting a very specific functional problem, which a structure must "solve" in order to be properly called a cell. A property theory tells us what the task is, and how this or that structure has managed to accomplish it. Obviously transition theories and property theories can and do help each other out. If we want to understand a state transition in a complex system, we may need to learn first through a property theory how the antecedent and consequent states are realized in that system, and only then look for transition theories to subsume the lower-level events under causal generalizations. This is obviously how it's going to work for hurricanes and disasters. An analysis of hurricanes in terms of temperatures and velocities of air and water molecules, plus some transition theories predicting the effects of such molecules in such states on various kinds of solids, topped off with some functional analyses of things like people, livestock, houses, trees, and beachfront properties, and we have the complete story, not only about what caused the disaster, but about why talk of hurricanes explains the disaster. Well. Now that we've got all that settled, it's pretty obvious how Davidson's model of the explanatory value of rationalizations ought to be filled out. Davidson is right that we don't need to bother about finding empirically substantive transitiontheories relating reasons to actions, and he's right that the causal element in appeals to reasons is underwritten by the existence of true causal generalizations relating the state transitions of the realizing physiological system. All that's missing is the account of why those state transitions add up to a reason's producing an action-that is, a property theory for psychological properties.20 If this account of the causal production of actions by reasons is even roughly correct, then there is a way to deal with the examples that seem to threaten causal theories of intentional action. What
20This is precisely what Cummins develops in Cummins, 1983. See Chapter III, "Understanding Cognitive Capacities," especially Sections 6 and 7. 172

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we now have is the possibility of an account of what "the right way" is for reasons to cause actions in order truly to rationalize them. Recall the case of the discomposed climber, cited above. The climber's desire to be free of his partner, in conjunction with his belief that letting go of the rope would free him, caused him to let go of the rope, although not in the way that would warrant our saying that he let go of the rope "because he wanted to be free of his partner." For comparison's sake, let's imagine another climber, a vicious one this time, who, having the same desire to be free of does what she believes will fulfill that deher partner, deliberately sire, viz., lets go of the rope. The problem for Davidson here is to say why a rationalization is a proper explanation in the second case but not in the first. Once we grant property theories their proper place in the ontology of explanations, we can see a principled difference between the two cases. In the case of the vicious climber, an analysis of the climber's psychology will reveal a complex system of interconnected physiological sub-systems organized in such a way that, when the system comes to realize the psychological state of wanting to be free of one's partner, relevant sub-systems will be engaged and (as predicted by relevant transition theories) will shift into a state intentionally characterized as "letting go the rope." Things are only superficially similar with the discomposed climber. Here, we may suppose, the physiological properties of the belief and desire states that were causally implicated in the motor movements we call "letting go of the rope" were not the physiological properties in virtue of which those states instantiate the psychological properties of wanting to be free and believing letting go the rope will do it. The situation is rather like that of a badly housed computer, which, whenever it begins to compute the square root of 16, begins to vibrate so heartily that it jogs the printer, which, being so jogged, prints out the numeral "4." In the case of the vicious climber, the reference to beliefs and desires is explanatory because it points us toward a functional analysis of the climber as a psychological system, and because in this case, the event in question is properly viewed as the proper result of the proper operation of this psychological system. In the case of the discomposed climber, however, it is close to an accident that the physiological antecedents of the explanandum had psychological descriptions that appeared to rationalize the "action." (Indeed, 173

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the fact that everyone who discusses these cases finds it odd to call the consequent events "actions" lends plausibility to the hypothesis that in these cases, the psychological mechanisms adverted to in a rationalization are not actually engaged.) All physiological states have an enormous number of properties, each property representing a variety of causal potentials. What the functional analysis of the climber's psychology will give us is an account of how particular intensional properties-like "being a desire to be free of one's partner"-can be co-instantiated and coordinated with just the right causal potentials. In other words, it is a property theory of psychological states that will tell us how actions can be caused in virtue of their reasonableness. This is what Davidson needs. Unfortunately for him, he can't have it. The difficulty stems from Davidson's commitment to PAM and PNG-not so much from the principles themselves, for perhaps they could be charitably recast in light of the complexities introduced by Cummins's discussion-but from the basis of these commitments. I will argue that Davidson's belief in the "anomalism" of the mental is part of a strong skepticism about the psychological, derived from Davidson's understanding of central Quinean doctrines, and radically incompatible with Davidson's solution to the problem of explanatory force. V.
DAVIDSON'S PSYCHOLOGICAL SKEPTICISM

Let's survey these commitments of Davidson's. There is, first of all, PAM (there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained). PAM, I've argued, is obscure, but at least must be taken to entail PNG (there are no strict deterministic laws formulable in the vocabulary of psychology). Cummins's discussion of the role of laws in explanation raises questions about the significance of these two principles: if Davidson has in mind causal generalizations when he speaks of "strict deterministic laws" (and there's every reason to think he does), then the two principles, even if true, are irrelevant to issues about the status of psychological explanations, for both could be true even if there are excellent property theories explaining the realization of psychological kinds in physical systems. It's tempting to see Davidson's emphasis on the "anomalism" of the mental as fundamentally an attack on strong reductionism, 174

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and to see the theory of anomalous monism as primarily an attempt to demonstrate the possibility of materialism in the face of the non-reducibility of psychological states. But to interpret Davidson in this way-as a closet functionalist-is a mistake. He is rejecting far more than strong reductionism, and his reasons for rejecting even that are not the familiar functionalist ones. As noted, skepticism about reductive psychological laws is quite compatible with optimism about property theories for psychology. But Davidson categorically denies the possibility of any systematic empirical treatment of psychological states and events. He does not make the easily remedied mistake of inferring the impossibility of psychology from the falsity of reductionism-Davidson's inference goes precisely the other way around. His rejection of reductive laws depends upon a prior, radical rejection of psychology tout court. Functionalists reject strong reductionism because of the possibility of (or likelihood of, or demonstrated fact of) multiple realizations of psychological states. Davidson's arguments, on the other hand, stem from general arguments against the possibility of any kind of psychological laws. These arguments comprise variations on two themes: (a) beliefs, desires, and other psychological states do not form a "closed system," and (b) that the methodology of psychological ascription involves non-empirical elements. None of these arguments is successful, and I'll indicate briefly where I think they go wrong. But my main objective at this point is not to criticize Davidson's anti-realist arguments,2' but rather to document his metaphysical commitments, and to expose their source. I'll begin with a brief look at set (a), and then concentrate on set (b). What does Davidson mean by saying that mental events do not form a "closed system"? At points, Davidson seems to be saying simply that psychological events interact with events that are not psychological.22 But that fact alone would hardly impugn the science of psychology, any more than the fact that people trip over
21A comprehensive and detailed critique of Davidson's arguments against psychological laws is to be found in Lycan, 1981. 22For example, in "Philosophy as Psychology," Davidson says that ". . . psychological events clearly cannot constitute a closed system; much happens that is not psychological, and affects the psychological" (Davidson, 1980, p. 230). 175

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rocks impugns the science of biology. What Davidson is really getting at is revealed more clearly in this passage: Physicaltheory promises to provide a comprehensiveclosed system guaranteedto yield a standardized,unique descriptionof every physical event couched in a vocabularyamenableto law. It is not plausible that mental concepts alone can provide such a framework,simply because the mental does not, by [the principle of mental-physical interaction]constitutea closed system (ME, p. 224). Here we see that Davidson's objection to psychology stems not from the fact that psychological events interact with non-psychological events, but from the more fundamental fact that nonpsychological events even exist-or, to be more precise, from the fact that there exist events which the language of psychology is inadequate to describe. Physics (Davidson presumes) does not in suffer this limitation. It is comprehensive the sense that every process in nature, whatever else is true of it, admits of some characterization in physical terms. And from the fact that physics comprehends (in this sense) all of nature, Davidson argues, it follows that physics is fundamental. To the extent that Davidson's basis for rejecting psychology is this invidious comparison between the prospective scopes of psychology and physics, his argument is essentially a reiteration of one of Quine's arguments for indeterminacy.23 But this argumentwhether we consider Davidson's version or Quine's-shows either too much or too little. It either demonstrates that physics, being the only truly fundamental science, is the only genuine science; or, it shows that since non-fundamental systems like biology can constitute genuine sciences, that fundamental-ness should not be accepted as a criterion of scientific legitimacy. In either case, psychology remains no worse off than biology.

23An illustrative passage from "Facts of the Matter": "What [physicalism says] about the life of the mind is that there is no mental difference It is a way of saying that the fundawithout a physical difference.... mental objects are the physical objects. It accords physics its rightful place as the basic natural science without venturing any dubious hopes of reduction of other disciplines" (Quine, 1979, p. 163). Significantly, Quine approvingly cites "Mental Events" in support of his claim that "the groupings of events in mentalistic terms need not stand in any systematic relation to biological groupings" (ibid.).

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Yet Davidson wrote no companion piece, "Biological Events," supporting a thesis about the anomalism of the biological with the observation that the biological does not constitute a closed system. Why not? Quine's defense of the legitimacy of the biological sciences (and indeed, psychology as long as it's behaviorist) can be inferred from another familiar argument for indeterminacy, the so-called "argument from above."24 According to that argument, an arbitrary ''setting" of all physical parameters is sufficient for fixing the truth-conditions of claims in physics, and (presumably) in higherlevel sciences like biology, but not for the claims of semantics and mentalistic psychology. Hence, psychology is not simply underdetermined with respect to the physical facts, but underdetermined with respect to physical theory. It is this "second level" of underdetermination that constitutes genuine indeterminacy. Theory choice in such a domain can therefore not be a matter of empirically discovering antecedentally existing states of affairs, but must rather be, ultimately, a matter of convention, convenience, or aesthetic preference. When it comes to psychology, there is "no fact of the matter." Davidson, I contend, shares this view of psychology with Quine, but holds it for interestingly different reasons. For Davidson, as for Quine, psychology is not fully empirical because its domain is not "objective," in the sense that psychological attributions are human constructions, and answer as much to human concerns and perspectives, as to a pre-existing, mind-independent reality. But this alleged non-objectivity is not, in Davidson's mind, due to a second level of underdetermination,25 but rather to what he regards as an essential methodological feature of psychological theorizing. This brings us then, to the second of Davidson's two
24See Quine, 1970, "On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation." An argument against applying the argument from above to the problem at hand is that in this article Quine makes the puzzling admission that much of theoretical physics, and all of our ordinary material-object talk is underdetermined by all possible evidence. Still he does say that mentalistic attributions suffer from an "additional" layer of underdetermination, that is, underdetermination with respect to physical theory and material-object talk. Whether Quine's position can be made coherent and plausible is an issue, thank heavens, beyond the scope of this paper. 25Davidson seems actually to rejectthe argument from above at ME, p. 221. 177

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themes: the methodological peculiarity of psychology. Davidson believes, I'm about to argue, that in psychology, non-empirical "interpretive" concerns trump all others. The source of the non-objectivity of psychology, according to Davidson, and the feature that finally sets psychology (and any "intentional" science) apart from physics, biology and the others, turns out to be, ironically, just what the methodological anticausalists always said it was-the normativity of rationalization. Let's look at the arguments in some detail. Davidson first notes that the ascription of mental contents is holistic: there can be no evidence for a particular psychological ascription unless a host of other ascriptions are assumed to be true. For example, nothing counts as evidence for or against the hypothesis that Hermione believes it's raining unless assumptions are made about what Hermione desires (for example, Hermione wants to keep dry). There is no assigningbeliefs to a person one by one on the basisof his verbal behavior, his choices, or other local signs no matter how plain and evident, for we make sense of particularbeliefs only as they cohere with other beliefs, with preferences, with intentions, hopes, fears, expectations,and the rest (ME, p. 221). From the first feature, the holistic character of belief/desire ascription, Davidson rightly infers that our "theoretical" conclusion that Hermione believes it's raining is vulnerable to a host of data other than the behavioral data which may have immediately prompted this ascription. Moreover, he continues, since only a finite number of these data are available at any time, our theorizing about mental states is always defeasible. But, as Davidson recognizes, the holistic nature of informal psychological theorizing would not, on its own, be enough to distinguish psychology from any of the natural sciences. Rather, he says, it's the holistic nature of psychological ascription taken together with its normativity that makes the difference. Put these two features together, and the result will be the impossibility of any systematic relation between psychological kinds and physical kinds: The nomological irreducibility of the mental does not derive merely from the seamlessnature of the world of thought, preference, and intention, for such interdependence is common to physical 178

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theory, and is compatiblewith there being a single right way of interpreting a man's [sic] attitudes without relativizationto a scheme of translation.... The point is rather that when we use the concepts of belief, desire, and the rest, we must stand prepared, as the evidence accumulates, to adjust our theory in the light of considerations of overall cogency: the constitutive ideal of rationality partly controls each phase in the evolution of what must be an evolving theory.... We must conclude ... that nomologicalslackbetween the mental and as the physicalis essential long as we conceive of man [sic]as a rational animal (ME,pp. 222-223). [My emphases.] This passage is difficult to unpack: first of all, let me note once again that Davidson's line represents an innovation in the defense of the indeterminacy thesis. For whereas Quine rests his case on a de facto underdetermination of psychology by physics, Davidson means to show that psychological claims ought not by their nature to be determined by the physical evidence. Within this same passage, Davidson says that the irreducibility of the mental is not due simply to the availability of more than one acceptable translation scheme, because determinacy could be secured easily enough by the arbitrary selection of a scheme.26 The real problem with such a strategy, Davidson declares, is not the arbitrariness in the selection of schemes, but rather that the fact that any fixing of psychophysical relations would preclude the "opportunistic tempering of theory," prompted and required by "the constitutive ideal of rationality" (ME, p. 223). Davidson clearly believes not only that certain normative constraints are essential to psychological theorizing, but that their presence gives psychological claims a different kind of grounding from that of fully empirical claims. He feels that a proper sensitivity to "considerations of overall cogency" requires not simply the usual epistemological willingness to revise belief/desire ascriptions in light of further developments, but rather, a radically relativistic attitude toward the whole enterprise. He believes that one should look upon psychological hypotheses not-as one views hypotheses in the physical sciences-as our best guesses about the nature of an objective phenomenon, but rather as artifacts reflective of our current stage of self-interpretation.
26This is, after all, a strategy Quine endorses for resolving residual indeterminacy in physics if any remains when all possible data is in. (See Quine, 1970.) 179

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Davidson provides no argument for this view, nor, indeed, any explicit avowal of it. But if we attribute to him this radically constructivist position on the nature of psychological "facts," it becomes possible to explain (though not to justify) some otherwise puzzling aspects of his view-notably, his insistence on the in-principle impossibility of any systematic, nomic connection between psychological and physiological states. For notice that even instantiation laws would (or could) provide physical criteria (or at least sufficient conditions) for psychological ascriptions. That, in turn, seems to allow the possibility of our obtaining the means to make a particular psychological ascription, independently of any more global information about the subject's other psychological states, and regardless of any normative considerations about the subject's rationality. The existence of physical criteria of psychological states would thus threaten to ossify the process of psychological interpretation, not by making it insensitive to new data, but by making it sensitive to the wrong kind of data. Davidson's fear, I believe, is that if psychological hypotheses could be decisively backed by physical evidence, then they could not play the expressive, interpretive role he has assigned them. In short, he believes that the only way to ensurethe satisfaction of the normative constraints distinctive of psychological theorizing is to insulate psychological ascriptions from any bodies of evidence that could potentially compete with "considerations of overall cogency." Because Davidson is a radical constructivist about psychological states, potential conflicts between the normative constraints operative in our "folk" psychologizing and the physical facts are not to be passively borne and devoutly hoped-against, as is the case with potential conflicts between other pre-theoretic taxonomies and their scientific refinements. To get the feel for the sort of situation I believe Davidson wants to guard against, consider the following hypothetical case. Suppose that from extensive observation of Hermione we have developed an extraordinarily well-confirmed instantiation theory. This means, among other things, that we have good reason to believe that in Hermione, neurophysiological state NP6 realizes the mental state of intending to write a book, and neurophysiological state NP7 realizes the mental state of believing that she will never write a book. Now suppose that we discover, by neurophysiological examination, that Hermione is in bothNP6 and NP7. Our well-confirmed 180

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instantiation theory tells us that Hermione both intends to write a book and believes that she will never write a book. But our appreciation of the normative aspects of psychological ascription tells us that this particular compound ascription borders on the incoherent: in the ordinary case, good evidence for the second ascription is strong evidence against the first.27 What are we to do? The physical data militate in one direction, "considerations of overall cogency" in precisely the other.28 Now for any materialistic functionalist, the possibility of such a
27Davidson does not make the claim that belief and intention are related in the way I've suggested. I offer this particular case simply as an illustration of the sort of thing I think Davidson has in mind. I should note that some philosophers have argued against the particular connection I'm assuming. See, for example, Brand, 1984. 280ne referee has suggested that the problem I sketch would not arise if we attended properly to Shoemaker's distinction between core and total realizations of psychological states (see Shoemaker, 1981). NP6 and NP7 must be considered, at best, only core realizations, it was argued. The total realizations of the intention and belief in question would surely embody the relevant normative constraint by making it a nomological impossibility for the two core states to be co-instantiated. Thus the full functional specification of these states would entail that either Hermione cannot be in NP6 and NP7 simultaneously, or else that, if she is in both states at the same time, that we are wrong in regarding one or both physiological states as the core instantiation of the relevant psychological state. While it's true that one could rule out the co-instantiation of core realizations of "intending to write a book" and "believing I will never write a book" in this way, I don't think this strategy can really dissolve the problem, nor can it be of much help to Davidson. Suppose that we do attempt to embody our pre-theoretic normative constraints within functional definitions in this way (and I am very sympathetic to this approach though see Section VII below for my own somewhat different suggestions about how to handle the normative constraints). The problem I envision can still arise if-and I take this situation to be a simple empirical possibility-it turns out that there is in fact no way to obtain total realizations of functional psychologies containing such strict constraints. We have two options, and neither will be of comfort to Davidson. Either we allow a modification of the normative constraints, in light of the totality of to Davidson, evidence, behavioral and neuro-physiological-anathema I've argued; or we insist on preserving the normative constraints, with the result that our best theory turns out not to be literally true of anyone. This in itself needn't bother Davidson, especially if, as I've argued, he's a radical anti-realist about psychology. We get no embodiment of our functional psychology at all. But it will be an embarassment when it comes time to solve the explanatory force problem, since it means that there will be no embodiment our best psychological theory. It's awfully hard to construct of an identity theory on a basis like that. 181

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situation is disconcerting. Too many cases of this sort would surely be evidence against the truth of the instantiation theory, for the simple reason that when pre-theoretic constraints are violated too blatantly and too frequently, the theory loses its claim to being a theory of its particular domain. If a psychological theory entailed possessed contradicthat human beings normallyand self-consciously tory beliefs, which were in turn never implicated in the production of behavior, but did reliably cause a swelling of the left ankle, one could legitimately protest that this was hardly a theory of belief at all. The real issue is not whether an empirical theory of the realization of belief can give any attention to normative, pre-theoretic conceptual connections among mental states-it seems clearly that it must. (I'll sketch my own view of how the normative constraints are to be accommodated in the last section.) Rather, the issue is whether or not these considerations are to be assigned the status of a priori truth. Davidson treats them in precisely this way, and has the metaphysics that goes along with such a position. But a naturalistic functionalist, whatever she decides in a case like the one above, must have the option of revision. What to do in such a case must be an open question. Davidson's theory gives and is designed to give an a priori and unequivocal answer in this and similar cases of apparent flouting of conceptual dependencies among psychological notions. Ascriptions of intention and belief, like all psychological ascriptions, are part of a complex interpretive project, the point of which is to render as complete and coherent a construal of the agent's behavior as possible. As a consequence, the applicability of psychological concepts is as much constrained by those concepts' relationships with each other as by the behavioral evidence they are invoked to explain. To link individual psychological ascriptions with evidentiary conditions outside the intentional realm would be, on Davidson's view, to destroy the flexibility of application necessary for the normative goal to be realized, and to introduce the possibility of conflicts like the one described above. This interpretation, with its echoes of the conceptualists' emphasis on logical connections, illuminates Davidson's remarks about "the different natures of the evidence" for physical and psychological claims. He says in ME that if denying the possibility of psycho-physical laws is not to be judged a prioristic, 182

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it can only be because to allow the possibility of such laws would amount to changing the subject.By changing the subjectI mean here: deciding not to accept the criterionof the mental in terms of the vocabularyof the propositionalattitudes (ME, p. 219). I conclude that Davidson is not only arguing against strong reductionism, but is opposed in principle to there being any systematic nomic relation between psychological and physical kinds. I'll conclude by rehearsing the consequences of this stance for his position on the explanatory force of rationalizations.
VI. THE PROBLEM: PART Two

Davidson's model of rationalization has it that the following is true: if RAT 1, rather than RAT 2, gives the reason why Hermione made the remark, that's true becausethe primary reason embodied in RAT 1 is identicalwith some physical event c, and c is the cause of Hermione's making the remark. The rationalization, "Hermione made the remark because she wanted to foster philosophical progress" is metaphysically underwritten by a physical, causal explanation in the same way ordinary explanations of disasters in terms of hurricanes are underwritten by more precise scientific accounts of the destructive force of water and wind. The first part of the problem concerned the difficulty Davidson must have in explaining why reference to the causally efficacious physical events in psychological terms sometimes does and sometimes does not serve to explain the ensuing event, even if the psychological attributions were true, and even if they serve to rationalize the event qua action. I argued that what Davidson needed was an account of how reasons can cause in virtue of theirrationalproperties, and that doing so would require a property theory of mental states. Now we can see why Davidson cannot accept such a friendly amendment. But additionally, we can now see that his "solution" to the problem of explanatory force in terms of a causal theory of action has utterly dissolved. On Davidson's view it cannot be a genuine fact that any physical event is identical with any mental event, for the application of mental predicates to events is always radically indeterminate. Whether the neurophysiological event c is identical with this primary reason or that one, must depend upon which psychological 183

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ascription we're inclined to make at a particular point in an "essentially evolving interpretation" of Hermione's behavior. Today we'll identify c with Hermione's wanting to foster philosophical progress, but tomorrow we'll find that we get a more cogent view of her overall if we identify the cause of her making the remark with her wanting to impress her professor. The point is not merely epistemological: the pertinent identities are non-existent, not merely unknowable. Since there are no genuine facts about the contents of Hermione's mental states, there can be no genuine facts about their relations with physical states. If it is a fact that c is identical with one rather than another mental event, it is a fact in virtue of our decision to accept one rather than another proposed rationalization of Hermione's action. The interpretation-relativity of psychological attribution infects psychophysical identities, even token ones. In short, it is the acceptability of particular rationalizations that metaphysically ground psycho-physical identities, and not the other way around. Davidson cannot explain the explanatory force of the rational "because" by appeal to underlying causal connections because there is no objective attachment between the interpretive psychological story we decide to tell and the physiological goings-on in a person's body. A reason cannot rationalize an action in virtue of some causal link between some physical event and its physical effect, simply because there is no fact of the matter which reason the cause is identical with. Davidson turns out to be committed to just what the anti-causalists have been trying to tell him all along: the goings-on in your body have nothing to do with why you do what you do.
VII. CONCLUSIONS

Davidson's commitment to the indeterminacy thesis makes his anomalous monism irreconcilable with his solution to the problem of explanatory force. But since anomalous monism is internally consistent, one option for Davidson would be simply to give up his causal account of rationalization. Indeed, it might seem reasonable for Davidson to give up altogether on the problem of explanatory force-why would someone who believes in indeterminacy think there's a fact of the matter about why Hermione made the remark, anyway?
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But those of us without Davidson's Quinean commitments will, I think, want to retain Davidson's solution to the problem of explanatory force, for the problem is compelling, and the solution is a good one. What we need, then, is a good functionalist account of psychological states. Right. And what the Middle East needs is a good regional peace plan. Mindful of the improbability of my saying anything either substantive or original on the topic, let me conclude with a brief advertisement for my personal favorite functionalist theory. Jerry Fodor has long argued that beliefs and other cognitive states are to be analyzed as relations between an agent and physically realized tokens of an internal medium of representation and computation, affectionately known as "mentalese." Because these tokens are physically realized, they have causal properties; because they realize linguistic items, they have syntacticand semanticproperties. One begins to see, on this view, how beliefs and desires can both cause and rationalize human behavior, and-because these tokens are functionally individuated-how one could get a theory of the right way for reasons to cause actions.29 There are other, non-representational versions of functionalism, to be sure, but it is the strong representationalism of Fodor's view that particularly suits it for use in an account of the explanatory force of rationalizations. I should, however, own up to the fact that this same feature makes it a very real possibility that there will be just the kinds of evidentiary conflicts-between physical evidence and considerations of cogency-that Davidson warns us of.30 Fortunately, I don't think that's a problem. Davidson's admonitions about retaining "allegiance" to "proper sources of evidence" are really echoes of the old anti-materialist arguments against the claim that mental states are physical states. Where they appealed to forms of privileged access ("no amount of

29The canonical arguments can be found in Fodor, 1975, and Fodor, 1978. As I noted earlier, the later work is of particular relevance here. 30There are brands of functionalism that don't carry this risk. Dennett, for example, is a functionalist; but because he denies that the realizing physical states map in any interesting way onto the contents of ordinary psychological ascriptions, he doesn't have to contend with Davidson's problem. But neither, I think, does he have a satisfactory answer to the problem of explanatory force. Dennett's, incidentally, is the theory of mind Davidson should really have. 185

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physical evidence could persuade me I wasn't in pain if I knew I was!"), Davidson appeals to "considerations of cogency." The general response is the same in both cases. Scientific theories must pay proper respect to the pre-theoretic judgments that, after all, give a working definition of their domains; but, as a famous philosopher once said, nothing is immune from revision. A theory of pain that overrides informants' judgments about their own feelings too often is a bad theory of pain. We can make the required degree of match as high as we like. But at some point, we may well allow that, strange as it may seem, people are sometimes wrong about whether or not they're in pain. If representationalism is correct, it could well turn out that physical evidence sometimes competes with considerations of cogency in the ascription of psychological states. But the unsatisfactory feel of this result is mitigated by the consideration that we can ensure, as with our imagined theory of pain, that the number of such conflicts is acceptably small. Specifically, quasi-conceptual connections between propositional attitudes, like the one between intention and belief suggested in Section II, can be preserved as constraints on the interpretation of mentalese tokens. Thus, while it remains a possibility for the normal basis for ascription of a psychological state (Hermione believes that P), to conflict with some piece of physical evidence (there's no token of P in Hermione's belief box), conditions of theoretical adequacy on the interpretation of a realizing physical state can ensure that this happens only rarely. Obviously, functionalism in general, and representationalism in particular, need a more thorough defense than I can possibly offer here. Perhaps there can be no psychological theory of the sort I've are many who think there can't, and for many described-there different reasons.31 My aim has been simply to show what's needed to make Davidson's original project work. If you want to account for the explanatory force of rationalizations, you can't be a Quinean about psychology. And that's the truth. North Carolina State University

3'See, for example, Stich, 1983; Burge, 1979; and Dennett, 1980. 186

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REFERENCES Anscombe, Elizabeth (1976). Intention. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press. Brand, Myles (1984). Intending and Acting: Toward a Naturalized Action Theory.Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press. Burge, Tyler (1979). "Individualism and the Mental," Midwest Studies in Philosophy:Studies in Metaphysics,Vol. IV. Edited by P. A. French, T. E. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press. Cummins, Robert (1983). The Nature of PsychologicalExplanation. Cambridge, Mass., Bradford Books/The MIT Press. Davidson, Donald (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. New York, N.Y., Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel (1980). "Beyond Belief," Thoughtand Object:Essays on Intentionality.Edited by Andrew Woodfield. Oxford, England, Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. Dray, W. H. (1957). Laws and Explanation in History. Oxford, England, Oxford University Press. ,(1963). "Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered," ThePhilosophyof History. Edited by Patrick Gardiner. Oxford, England, Oxford University Press (1974). Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York, N.Y., Thomas Crowell. , (1978). "Propositional Attitudes," The Monist 61. Hempel, Carl G. (1965). Aspectsof ScientificExplanation. New York, N.Y., Free Press. Lycan, William G. (1981). "Psychological Laws," Mind, Brain, Function: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Edited by J. J. Biro and Robert W. Shahan. Norman, Okla., University of Oklahoma Press. Melden, A. I. (1961). Free Action. Boston, Mass., Routledge and Kegan Paul. Putnam, Hilary (1960). "Minds and Machines," reprinted in Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality: PhilosophicalPapers, Vol. 2. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1975. Quine, W. V. 0. (1970). "On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation," Journal of Philosophy67, pp. 178-183. 9. of , (1978). "Factsof the Matter," The SouthwesternJournal Philosophy Ryle, Gilbert (1940). The Conceptof Mind. New York, N.Y., Barnes and Noble. Shoemaker, Sydney (1981). "Some Varieties of Functionalism," reprinted in Shoemaker (1984), pp. 261-286. (1984). Identity, Cause, and Mind: PhilosophicalEssays. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press. Stich, Stephen P. (1983). From Folk Psychologyto CognitiveScience: The Case Against Belief. Cambridge, Mass., Bradford Books/The MIT Press. von Wright, Georg Henrik (1971). Explanation and Understanding.Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press.

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