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3 - Persons and sub-systems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2009
Summary
But man is so partial to systems and abstract deduction that in order to justify his logic he is often prepared to distort the truth intentionally.
DostoyevskyTHE THEORY: DAVIDSON
This chapter continues the discussion of persons and their parts, in the form of Davidson and Pears' theory of sub-systems. What has to be determined is whether or not sub-systemic theory, which is founded on and elaborates the two intuitions for partition presented in 2.2, provides a successful form of explanation of irrationality.
Davidson says that cases of irrationality ‘may be characterised by the fact that there is a mental cause that is not a reason’ for the mental state that it causes. The appropriate move to make when confronted with such a cause is to ‘partition the mind’ in such a way that the ‘breakdown of reason-relations defines the boundary of a subdivision’. Parts emerge, through conceptual analysis, from the definition of irrationality as intentional behaviour that runs contrary to reason: they are ‘defined in terms of function; ultimately, in terms of the concepts of reason and of cause’.
Mental parts have three essential features:
First, the mind contains a number of semi-independent structures, these structures being characterized by mental attributes like thoughts, desires, and memories.
Second, parts of the mind are in important respects like people, not only in having (or consisting of) beliefs, wants and other psychological traits, but in that these factors can combine, as in intentional action, to cause further events in the mind and outside it. […]
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- Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis , pp. 59 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993