The Ontological Analysis Of Psycho-Physical Distinction

In Donald Davidson's famous paper"Mental Events"which causes widespread influence, he used the term"supervenience"to discuss the mind-body relation, and then made the term"supervenience"become a rather important concept in philosophy of mind. Davidson help inspire a kind of nonreductive physicalism. Among the opposing attitudes towards Davidson's"supervenience"concept and anomalous monism, Jaegwon Kim's critic proposition was the most severe. The antithesis of the notions between Davidson and Jaegwon Kim may be the kernel in modern philosophy of mind. Their argument was caused by the deviation in understanding and defining the basic concepts related to the theories. On one hand, Davidson insisted on a kind of"event ontology"which claimed that mental event and physical event as a case of token event is equivalent; on the other hand, he talked about the"supervenience"concept and non-strict mind-body law in the sense of type event. In this way, Davidson made it a little hard for people to understand his non-strict mind-body law and at the same time weakened the mental causation. In undertaking a philosophy study of Davidson's supervenience concept and anomalous monism, firstly, this paper wants to make the differentiation between his key concepts such as"token event and type event","mental event and physical event","singular causal relation and causal law", and"strict law and non-strict law". By way of this, it prepares to conduct a perception on base of ontological analysis, so as to indicate that Davidson's change between token event and type event will cause much difficulty in explaining mental causation. Finally, it attempts to expound that, in order to discuss"supervenience"and"nonreducibility"between mental event and physical event (as token event), entailing event a substantial position is helpful to balance"mental causation"and"non-strict mind-body law".