The Rational Character of Belief and the Argument for Mental Anomalism.

If mental anomalism is to be interpreted as a thesis unique to psychology, the anomalousness must be grounded in some feature unique to the mental, presumably its rational nature. While the ground for such arguments from normativity has been notoriously slippery terrain, there are two recently influential strategies which make the argument precise. The first is to deny the possibility of psychophysical bridge laws because of the different constitutive essences of mental and physical laws, and the second is to argue that mental anomalism follows from the uncodifiability of rationality. In this paper I argue that both strategies fail – the latter because it conflates prima facie and all things considered rationality and the former because it rests on a false premise, the principle of the rational character of belief. I distinguish four different formulations of this principle and argue that those formulations which are plausible cannot support the argument for mental anomalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]