tailieunhanh - The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 22

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 22. The book is alphabetized by the whole headings of entries, as distinct from the first word of a heading. Hence, for example, abandonment comes before a priori and a posteriori. It is wise to look elsewhere if something seems to be missing. At the end of the book there is also a useful appendix on Logical Symbols as well as the appendices A Chronological Table of Philosophy and Maps of Philosophy. | 190 Davidson Donald Quine with whom he shared a commitment to the fundamental importance of standard logic to metaphysics and a consequent suspicion of intensional entities like meanings propositions and properties or attributes. Exten-sionality intension and extension. Quine thinks that the language of first-order logic is adequate to limn the true and ultimate structure ofreality . Given this commitment what happens to those mental states whose ascriptions exhibit intensionality such as beliefs and desires The problem here is that the language which we use to attribute these states does not obey the principles of extensional logic. For example Leibniz s law the principle that if x y then whatever is true of x is true of y can fail when talking about beliefs and desires. If I believe that Cary Grant starred in Notorious it does not follow that I believe that Archibald Leach starred in Notorious since I may not know that Cary Grant is Archibald Leach. Since such intensionality is plausibly essential to descriptions of belief and desires how can we accommodate these states within a Quinean theory of the world Quine s own response to this is to adopt a form of elim-inativism about the mental mental categories are not suitable for science and should therefore be dispensed with. Davidson s approach is different. He agrees with Quine that the intensionality of mental descriptions renders mental categories irreducible as a whole to physical categories. But he rejects Quine s behaviourism and in Mental Events 1970 he uses the irreducibility of the mental as a premiss in an argument for a version of the identity theory of mind anomalous monism. Davidson argues for his identity theory by making the plausible assumption that all mental events causally interact with physical events. He also assumes that wherever there is causal interaction there is a strict law of nature encompassing the interacting events. This would seem to imply that there are psychophysical laws laws .