J ulie Y oo mental causation front and center up to this very day The argument draws on three principles: Mental Causation: At least some mental events interact causally with physical events Anomalism of the Mental: There are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained Nomological Character of Causality: Events enter into causal relations insofar as they fall under strict laws Given the principle of the anomalism of the mental, no mental event m can cause a physical event p (or any other event, for that matter) on account of its governance under a psychological law or psychophysical law, since no such laws exist.8 But the principle of the nomological character of causality requires that all causal relations be covered by a strict law.9 So if m is to cause p, there has to be a strict law that makes their causal connection possible As the only candidates for strict laws are physical laws, this means that m can cause p only if it is covered by a strict physical law An event’s being covered by a physical law entails that it is a physical event, so it follows that m is a physical event That is, every efficacious mental event is token identical with a physical event, and the token identity thesis is established This establishes monism in the form of token physicalism Demonstrating the causal efficacy of mental events is now easy: because physical events unproblematically enter into causal relations and mental events simply are physical events, mental events are causally efficacious 4.1.2 Criticisms of Davidson’s argument Token physicalism is the linchpin of Davidson’s theory of anomalous monism, and virtually every philosopher concedes that the theory allows for a mental event to cause other events.10 But a number of critics have objected that anomalous monism blocks an event’s mental properties from playing a causal role and thus fails to furnish a solution to the problem of mental causation (Loewer and LePore 1987; Fodor 1989; McLaughlin 1989) Take any causal relation holding between a reason c and an action e According to the critics, c causes e in virtue of subsumption under a strict causal law Laws of this kind relate only physical properties because it is only in physics that we get strict laws So what secures the causal relation between c and e is c’s instantiation of a physical property, not its instantiation of a mental property Therefore, the critics conclude, c qua mental makes no causal difference since it is c qua physical that accounts for c’s efficacy, permitting mental events to enter into the same causal relations even if the content were changed or eliminated as long their physical properties remained intact Surely, an account of mental causation that is indifferent to thought content is not an account of mental causation 182