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Full Idea
Davidson rejects ontological reduction of mental to physical because propositional attitudes are holistic; there must be extensive coherence among someone's attitudes to treat them as a rational person, and this has no counterpart in physical theory.
Gist of Idea
Reduction is impossible because mind is holistic and brain isn't
Source
report of Donald Davidson (Mental Events [1970]) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.5
Book Ref
Maslin,Keith: 'An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind' [Polity 2001], p.202
A Reaction
I don't find this view persuasive. We treat the weather in simple terms, even though it is almost infinitely complex. Davidson has a Kantian overconfidence in our rationality. A coherence among the parts is needed to be a tree.
| 3529 | Reduction is impossible because mind is holistic and brain isn't [Davidson, by Maslin] |
| 2307 | Anomalous monism says nothing at all about the relationship between mental and physical [Davidson, by Kim] |
| 5497 | Mind is outside science, because it is humanistic and partly normative [Davidson, by Lycan] |
| 4081 | Anomalous monism says causes are events, so the mental and physical are identical, without identical properties [Davidson, by Crane] |
| 2321 | If rule-following and reason are 'anomalies', does that make reductionism impossible? [Davidson, by Kim] |
| 3404 | Davidson claims that mental must be physical, to make mental causation possible [Davidson, by Kim] |
| 3405 | If mental causation is lawless, it is only possible if mental events have physical properties [Davidson, by Kim] |
| 3429 | Multiple realisability was worse news for physicalism than anomalous monism was [Davidson, by Kim] |
| 6620 | Davidson sees identity as between events, not states, since they are related in causation [Davidson, by Lowe] |
| 3524 | Causation is either between events, or between descriptions of events [Davidson, by Maslin] |
| 3526 | Whether an event is a causal explanation depends on how it is described [Davidson, by Maslin] |
| 16041 | Supervenience of the mental means physical changes mental, and mental changes physical [Davidson] |
| 4983 | There are no rules linking thought and behaviour, because endless other thoughts intervene [Davidson] |