EP IPHENOMENAL ISM AND CONTENT

A salient feature of any given explanation is that it should have a certain modal force-- that it should be able to support he appropriate sorts of counterfactuals nd subjunctive conditionals. And so it is with action explanation. Rationalizing explanations make essential use of the content of the agent's propositional ttitudes. Thus if an agent desires that p and believes that, by doing A, p will be realized, the agent will perform A. If this familiar form of reasoning is to have any explanatory bite, then it must be able to support certain counterfactuals. We want to be able to say that if the agent didn't have the relevant beliefs and desires, he wouldn't have performed action A. Token physicalism purports to resolve the problem about psycho-physical causation by reducing it to the relatively unproblematic physical-physical causation. Thus a physical event Pl, which is token identical with a contentful mental event, causes a physical event P2, which is itself token identical with an intentional action. According to Davidson, a singular causal statement will be subsumed by some physical law relative to the appropriate descriptions. But the causal or nomological necessity attached to the singular causal statement in virtue of its nomic subsumption isn't sufficient o capture the appropriate counterfactuals required of our belief-desire xplanations. I want to argue that if, as Davidson claims, rationalizing explanations are a species of causal explanation, then it isn't enough that the relevant propositional ttitudes are token identical with the appropriate physical events, or even that the content of the relevant propositional ttitudes "weakly supervene"1 on the physical state of the agent, but rather, in order to capture the modal force of folk psychological explanations, the relevant propositional ttitudes must have their causal efficacy in virtue of their semantic ontent. That is to say that having semantic ontent, being a belief that p, must be a causally relevant property. If, o