Greg Detre
Friday, 26 May, 2000
Helen Steward
at least some mental events interact causally with physical events
where there is causality, there must be a law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws
there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained
�Anomalous monism entails this: the very same network of casalt relations would obtain in Davdison�s world if you were to redistribute mental properties over its events any way you like: you would not distrub a single causal relation if you randomly and arbitrarily reassigned mental properties to events, or even removed mentality entirely from the world. The fact is that under Davidson�s anomalous monism, mentality does no causal work. Remember: on anomalous monism, events are causes or effects only as they instantiate physical laws, and this means that an event�s mental properties make no causal difference. And to suppose that altering an event�s mental properties would also alter its physical properties and thereby affect its causal relations is to suppose that Psychophysical Anomalism, a cardinal tenet of anomalous monism, is false.�
�a predicate p is supervenient on a set of predicates S if for every pair of objects such that p is true of one and not of the other, there is a predicate in S that is true of one and not of the other�.
�� assume that two systems are in the same total physical
state �; psychophysical supervenience implies this: if the systems change in
some identical physical respect Q, they must change in an identical mental
respect M.�