@SameiHuda takes on the philosophical challenge posed by Davidson's anomalous monism (which, if true, cripples the explanatory potential of clinical neuroscience) & argues that at least some mental functions can be expected to have "type identity" from an evolutionary perspective https://twitter.com/SameiHuda/status/1260658525736325121

Some background for those unfamiliar with types & tokens: Type refers to 'a general sort of thing' and token refers to particular concrete instances. Think of the make of a car as 'type' and a particular car as 'token'. Two Subaru cars are two tokens of the same type. (1/n)

"Type identity" in philosophy of mind asserts that mental events can be grouped into types, which correspond to types of physical events in the brain. If you can figure out the types and the relationships, you can arrive at a meaningful scientific explanation. (2/n)

But if there are no mental types, then are no psycho-physical laws which relate the mental & the physical. That is Davidson's position. He says there are only token-token correspondences which fall outside of the type-type correspondences. (3/n)

This is a figure from wikipedia which illustrates this quite well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism#/media/File:Anomalous_Monism.png

With this background, you can now go ahead & enjoy @SameiHuda 's paper! (4/4)