Abstract

Donald Davidson holds that intentional concepts are not reducible to physical or dispositional ones. This is due, he claims, to the constitutive role of normativity in the principles that govern the application of intentional concepts. According to Davidson, the specific way in which norms of rationality and coherence are mobilised by our interpretative principles sets mental concepts off from those of the natural sciences. I agree with Davidson on the irreducibility of the mental. However, I show that irreducibility is due not to the normative character of intentional concepts, but to holism and the flexibility of interpretative principles. I then consider three arguments that Davidson has put forth to support the irreducibility of intentional properties on the basis of their normative character, and show that none of them goes through