A few years ago I took some comments by David Chalmers as a way of thinking about Davidson and Peirce. Now that I've returned to Davidson and have been reading more of his essays and reading them a tad closer, I think I was way off. I was perhaps too caught up in Davidson's earlier positions - many of which he backed away from. The key issue was the nature of why the mental was irreducible to the physical. In that post I took it as a more thorough problem of translation wrapped up in holism. Roughly the idea that to translate the mental one would need all the physical. Davidson, especially towards the end of his life, saw his appeal to Quine as mistaken. The issue, as Davidson saw it, was that indeterminacy of translation was primarily about the fact that for any fact of the matter was due to the many ways it could be expressed. So, for example, a weight could be expressed in terms of kilograms, pounds, stones, or whatever. Not quite the problem I suggested Peirce seeing.
I still think Peirce's view of mind and anomalous monism are closely related. Just that the defense is going to be different for Peirce as from Davidson, due to different commitments.
Davidson's position is that the irreducibility of the mental to the physical is a trivial point. That is the mental is normative in a way the physical isn't. Put simply a physical law has no exceptions whereas a mental norm does. (For Peirce that distinction doesn't hold - but that's because Peirce sees the physical as being more mental-like than I think Davidson does) Put an other way, there's a certain sense of arbitrariness in mental descriptions. Mental description often are seen as in a tension between incompatible needs and we pick a middle ground to express our descriptions in the midsts of these tensions. Physical law, on the other hand, never exists in such a tension.
Now certainly Davidson's approach offers certain parallels to Continental thought. I'll comment a bit on that over the next few days. My big question is whether Davidson is ultimately correct in his claim. Ironically I found his earlier arguments more persuasive than his later ones, simply because I don't think indeterminacy of translation is only a matter of different symbols that mean the same thing. But I'll discuss that later as well.
I don't know much about Davidson, but it does seem to me that his position (as you've stated it) is unjustifiable. We naturally imagine that the actual laws of nature would not permit exceptions, but they might. E.g., there might be a Creator who set up laws to hold in general but which s/he could override. And that might be just the way of things, without the Creator but with Chance instead. Or perhaps natural laws are necessarily Humean (and so forth). And surely there might be mental laws that permit no exceptions (we might even posit some). Incidentally, I'm not sure what you mean by a mental description. It seems to me that the words we use for physical descriptions are often imprecise in some way.
Well I think Davidson is understandably rejecting the kind of occasionalism that someone like Ockham might adopt. He is trying to reconcile a more traditional sense of physicalism with his claim that the mental is irreducible but not for ontological reasons.
You point about imprecision is primarily why I reject Davidson's point. Yes beliefs, intents and other mental states are all described with terms that aren't strictly lawlike. However a lot of physical terms are as well. Consider the sentence, "the sky is blue." That seems to fall prey to exactly the same problems Davidson sees in mental descriptions. Now one can say this actually is a mental description. But I find that problematic. Or one can point to artificial languages science has invented. (That's the Quinean move so I think Davidson would be apt to adopt it) It then becomes unclear why one couldn't adopt an artificial language for psychology much as one does for physics. Indeed isn't that the point of Rorty's argument in Philosophy and the Mirrors of Nature? Now he pushes it further than one should, but say we can correlate mentalistic behavior with something like triggering of C fibers. Haven't we created an artificial language that avoids Davidson's critique?
The other problem with Davidson's approach is that I think it simply fails to avoid falling into a hidden form of epiphenomalism. That is what he wants his approach to do it simply isn't up to doing.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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