The Exclusion Problem From The Perspective Of Davidson's Nominalism

III Generally speaking,the discussion of mind-body relationship originated from Descartes' substance dualism.The major problem of substance dualism is the problem of mental causation.In Descartes' view,the problem of mental causation is how a non-material mind interacts with a material entity.Few philosophers accept of substance dualism nowadays: most of them turn to supporting physicalism.However,the problem of mental causation has not been resolved.It has become a problem of how mental properties interact causally with the physical world,and a problem of the causality of mental properties.In the debate about the problem of mental causation,Davidson's abnormal monism and his concept of supervenience are influential.As the main theory of non-reductive physicalism,Davidson's theory is faced with sharp criticism from many philosophers,such as,Jaegwon Kim,who came up with the "exclusion argument" as a challenge to non-reductive physicalism.The exclusion argument reveals that non-reductive physicalism is not a stable stance to hold: it would collapse into either epiphenomenism or reductive physicalism.In order to save non-reductive physicalism and defend the causality of mental properties,philosophers of mind have come up with many solutions to the exclusion problem,such as the autonomy solutions,the inheritance solutions,the identity solutions,the counterfactual solutions.The focus of this paper is to discuss a conservative defense strategy,that is,in night of a nominalistic interpretation of Davidson's abnormal monism,clarifying the misunderstanding of the relevant works of Davidson's by Kim,in the hope to fend off Kim's accusation.This paper addresses the following issues: firstly,I will introduce Davidson's abnormal monism and the concept of supervenience.Secondly,I will introduce the exclusion argument,and then briefly analyze and evaluate several solutions to the problem.Thirdly,in night of my discussion of the two issues,I will show that the aforementioned solutions have obvious defects and cannot solve the problem raised by the exclusion argument.Fourthly,I will carefully compare Davidson's and Kim's understandings of some important concepts.Fifthly,I will focuses on the conservativedefense strategies advocated by Chen Gang,Wang Xiaoyang,and Cynthia Macdonald,who are representative scholars trying to solve the exclusion problem by ways of a conservative defense strategy.There are some minor differences between these scholars' arguments,but this paper holds that their arguments are similar in the sense that,from a nominalistic perspective,they all point out that Kim failed to understand Davidson's work properly.That is to say,after clarification,Davidson's theory can avoid falling prey to the exclusion argument.Finally,by clarifying Davidson's interpretion theory,I will show that the nominalistic defense strategy is feasible.