Author's reply

Author's reply: Concerning the substantive philosophical issues, while Drs Murphy and Owen and colleagues are correct that Davidson himself embraces non-strict laws, the important question has always been whether or not his anomalous monism, like any form of non-reductive materialism, is entitled to them. Essentially, as many of Davidson's commentators have pointed out, non-strict laws lead to intractable difficulties with mental causation (Kim, 1993). The upshot is that non-reductive materialism faces the horns of an interpretationist–reductionist dilemma. My editorial makes it plain which horn I prefer to be impaled on and my discussion of ‘Philosophical Anthropology’ (Turner, 2003) was an attempt to explain why interpretationism is not compatible with laws of any kind. The reason, which is worth reiterating, is that mental states qua interpretations are not, as Murphy and Owen et al assume, brute data. Understanding their meanings is a presupposition of formulating the very laws on which non-reductive materialism is allegedly based (Von Wright, 1971).

This brings me to Owen et al's puzzling claim that biological psychiatrists are not trying to solve the mind–body problem. One reason the claim is puzzling is that Owen et al's ‘correlations’ are the very non-strict laws that, by their own admission, have played a crucial role in recent attempts to solve the mind–body problem. In any case, I think we can safely say that the mind–body problem, like Owen et al's argument, would be helped considerably by the discovery of non-strict laws. The authors, of course, realise this and proceed to inform us that their existence is ‘obvious’. I must say that if their existence were as obvious as Owen et al make out, then it is unlikely that they would have had to rely on Penfield to justify their claims. Indeed, it is interesting that while Owen et al are keen to remind us that Jaspers is not the last word in psychopathology, they are oblivious to the implications of allowing that Penfield is the last word on psychophysical correlations.

From the hermeneutical perspective what makes mental states mental states is that they are rationally and holistically related to one another. Once these relations are removed, as they are, for example, in hallucinations, autochthonous delusions and ‘Penfieldesque’ states, then it becomes difficult to justify the claim that the phenomena in question are mental states. This is where Jaspers' notion of ‘un-understandability’ comes in. Un-understandability is introduced by Jaspers precisely to signal that in some circumstances the search for understanding must be replaced by the search for psychophysical correlations. Therefore, one might reasonably have expected that even if cognitive psychologists labouring to extend the boundaries of folk-psychological understanding found Jaspers' notion ‘obstructive to progress’, Owen et al would embrace it. Instead, they apparently find Jaspers' contribution ‘obscure’, and to justify their claim they are content to ‘appeal simply to the authority’ of Cutting.

Criticisms of criticisms aside, what does seem obvious is that the dividing line between psychopathology and normality can only be arbitrarily drawn. This suggests that Owen et al are really advocating, not extricating psychiatry from the humanities, but extricating humanity from the humanities. Ridiculous as this may seem, it should come as no surprise since it is what most biological psychiatrists secretly think is possible anyway.