Davidson’s Anomalous Monism

Anomalous Monism, developed by philosopher Donald Davidson, holds that mental properties and events must have a physical ontology but that psychology cannot be reduced to physics. As such, Anomalous Monism is a form of property dualism and shares features with Non-Reductive Physicalism. As Davidson writes, “anomalous monism holds that mental entities (particular time- and space-bound objects and events) are physical entities, but that mental concepts are not reducible by definition or natural law to physical concepts” (Davidson, 1993).

Core Claims and Argument

Anomalous Monism is distinguished from other theories of consciousness by the intersection of three propositional claims: (i) Mental events have genuine causal powers and cause physical events. (ii) All causal relationships are backed by natural laws. (iii) There are no natural laws connecting mental phenomena with physical phenomena. While each claim has adherents, it is the conjunction of the three claims, taken together, that gives Anomalous Monism its distinctive look, because at first glance there surely appears to be inconsistency (if not contradiction) (Silcox, n.d.).

To appreciate Anomalous Monism's originality and subtleties, it needs to be unpacked. A foundational principle is that “psychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot in principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining human thoughts and actions (mental anomalism).” And it is “precisely because there can be no such strict laws governing mental events that those events must be identical to physical events” (Yalowitz, 2021).

How to make sense of this? What may seem like a non sequitur is in fact the heart of the argument. If the physical is the only existent, then ipso facto the mental (like everything else) must come from the physical with robust regularities. But how do the mental and physical articulate? What is this connection?

Here's the flow of the argument. Given that the mental has causal powers (claim 1), and that all causal relationships require natural law (claim 2), because there are no natural (psychophysical) laws that connect the mental and the physical (claim 3), therefore there is only one logical way to connect mental events and physical events—now denied a causal relationship (combining claims 2 and 3): they must be literally the same thing, the mental and the physical must be in the strong sense identical.

Identity and Distinctions

As identity theories of consciousness are a leitmotif, and a touchstone, for comprehending the Landscape, we go deeper. Earlier identity theories held that “claims concerning the identity of particular mental and physical events (tokens) depended upon the discovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical properties (types) … Token-identity claims thus depended upon type-identity.”

But Anomalous Monism, almost by its founding premise, does not depend on such psychophysical laws. “Davidson's position is dramatically different … It in effect justifies the token-identity of mental and physical events through arguing for the impossibility of type-identities between mental and physical properties” (Yalowitz, 2021).

Now of course this argument proves that the mental and the physical are identical only to the extent that the three premises are all accepted as valid, because the conclusion is embedded (or “hidden”) within the premises (as are all deductive arguments structured in this way). Anomalous Monism differs from other theories especially in claiming that there are no natural laws connecting mental phenomena with physical phenomena. Other theories assume there are laws or ways to connect the mental and the physical, or laws or ways where the mental and the physical are part of, or derived from, the same stuff.