A Monist's Anomaly

A question surfaced today in "The Nature of Human Nature" about D. Davidson's anomalous monism (AM). Here's a thumbnail sketch of AM from philosophyprofessor.com:

"...View associated especially with the American philosopher Donald Davidson (1920-2003), saying that mental events are identical with certain physical events (hence the monism), but that there are no laws which are purely mental, or which connect mental events with physical ones (hence the 'anomalous'; that there are no strict deterministic laws for predicting or explaining mental events is called the 'anomalism of the mental').

This is because whether two events are connected by a law depends on how they are described. Two mental events will also be two physical events, and described in physical terms may be connected by a law; but if one or both are described in mental terms (for example, as a decision rather than as a neuron-firing), no law will connect them.

This is because, though any mental event is identical with some physical event, there is no reason to think that all mental events of a certain kind (for example, all decisions) are also physical events of one and the same kind (for example, a certain kind of neuron-firing)."

What does AM have to do with our topic, determinism and free will? If Davidson is right to say that there are no psycho-physical laws connecting mental events with physical events, then his anomalous (that is, non-lawlike) explanation of the mind and its originating intentions would seem to be consistent with his nonreductive physicalistic (and deterministic) view of the universe.

The two common criticisms of this apparently "compatibilist" approach to questions surrounding free will and determination are (1) that, contra Davidson, such lawlike connections do in fact exist (hence AM is wrong) and (2) that, assuming that these laws, pace Davidson, do not exist, the mental threatens to become strictly irrelevant to explanations of our actions, leading to the much-discredited theory of human action called epiphenomenalism.

Comments always welcome.

DKJ