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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] |
| 3964 | If the mind is an anomaly, this makes reduction of the mental to the physical impossible [Davidson] |
| 5798 | Consciousness has a first-person ontology, so it cannot be reduced without omitting something [Searle] |
| 2314 | Maybe intentionality is reducible, but qualia aren't [Kim] |
| 3427 | Reductionism is impossible if there aren't any 'bridge laws' between mental and physical [Kim] |
| 3439 | Reductionism gets stuck with qualia [Kim] |
| 4091 | The problems of misrepresentation and error have dogged physicalist reductions of intentionality [Crane] |
| 4601 | Higher-level sciences cannot be reduced, because their concepts mark boundaries invisible at lower levels [Heil] |
| 4602 | Higher-level sciences designate real properties of objects, which are not reducible to lower levels [Heil] |
| 2533 | Rule-following can't be reduced to the physical [Sturgeon] |