psychophysical laws

Laws connecting psychological or mental states with physical states. The existence of such laws was influentially denied by Davidson, who argued that descriptions of mental events are intrinsically unsuited to occurrence in genuine laws (see anomalous monism ). The idea is that mental ascriptions answer to a wide variety of contextual and other factors that render them unfit for precise correlation with any physical descriptions, either of behaviour or of underlying neurophysiology. Davidson, along with many other philosophers of mind, nevertheless accepts the supervenience of the mental on the physical, and the question of whether one can have supervenience without lawlike connection has been the topic of vigorous debate.