In recent years, a new dispute has risen to prominence: the dispute between realists and anti-realists about causal powers. Albeit sometimes overlooked, the meta-ontological features of this “question of realism for powers” are quite peculiar. For friends and foes of causal powers have characterized their contrasting views in a variety of different ways; as existence claims, as semantic or truth-making claims, as fundamentality claims, as claims about the nature of certain properties. Not only does this multiplicity of interpretations make it (...) unclear what the genuine bone of contention is, if there is one; some of them appear to be mutually exclusive. Some light can be shed on this apparent yet widespread confusion by distinguishing three degrees of ontological involvement in dispositional truths; viz., three ways, of increasing robustness, to read ontological commitments from dispositional truths. Relatedly, by exploring the literature, and focusing on some selected examples of power realism and anti-realism, we can observe that power realists vastly disagree over the intrinsic nature ad make-up of dispositional properties. Such examples furthermore invite the thought that the question of realism for powers is best understood not as the debate around the existence of properties with a distinctive identity, but rather as a debate about metaphysical hierarchy. Finally, some anti-realists positions are indistinguishable from realist ones, using merely intensional resources: power realism is best appreciated by going hyperintensional. (shrink)

There seems to be some kind of close relationship between desires and behavioral dispositions. While a popular view about the nature of desire is that it essentially involves dispositions towards action, there do seem to be pressing objections to this view. However, recent work on dispositional properties potentially undermines some of the metaphysical assumptions that lie beneath these objections.

ABSTRACT:The language of virtue is gaining wider appreciation in the philosophical, psychological, and management literatures. Ethicists and social scientists aim to integrate normative and empirical approaches into a new “science of virtue.” But, I submit, they are talking past each other; they hold radically different notions of what a virtue is. In this paper, I shall examine two conflicting conceptions of virtue, what I call the reductive and the non-reductive accounts of virtue. I shall critically study them and argue that (...) the non-reductive view is the best philosophical account of virtue and the only one that can account for the way we talk about virtue in business and in everyday life. We can only understand what it means to act virtuously through the examination of the attitudes, beliefs, desires, and inclinations of the virtuous agent. I shall illustrate the differences between the reductive and non-reductive accounts by considering the virtue of gratitude. (shrink)

In the history of thought the relation between the mind and the body has been discussed in terms of various analogies. Plato, for example, examined the analogy of a man and his clothes and of the music of an instrument and the instrument itself; Aristotle advocated the analogy of an instrument's capacity and the instrument itself; Descartes alluded to that of a pilot and his ship; and Ryle derided that of a ghost and a machine.What I wish to discuss, however, (...) are the analogies used by contemporary philosophers to explain their theory that the mind is the brain, that the mind's states, capacities and qualities are the brain's states, capacities and qualities, that our thoughts and our thinking are brain elements and brain movements and that our mental experiences, such as having images or sensations, are brain processes. Various analogies have been advanced to explain the sense in which one of the former is one of the latter. (shrink)

This article describes abductions as special patterns of inference to the best explanation whose structure determines a particularly promising abductive conjecture and thus serves as an abductive search strategy. A classification of different patterns of abduction is provided which intends to be as complete as possible. An important distinction is that between selective abductions, which choose an optimal candidate from given multitude of possible explanations, and creative abductions, which introduce new theoretical models or concepts. While selective abduction has dominated the (...) literature, creative abductions are rarely discussed, although they are essential in science. The article introduces several kinds of creative abductions, such as theoretical model abduction, common cause abduction and statistical factor analysis, and illustrates them by various real case examples. It is suggested to demarcate scientifically fruitful abductions from purely speculative abductions by the criterion of causal unification. (shrink)

A central problem for any truthmaker theory is the problem of negative truths. In this paper, I develop a novel, piecemeal strategy for solving this problem. The strategy puts central focus on a truth-relevant notion of aboutness within a metaphysically modest version of truthmaker theory and uses key conceptual tools gained by taking a deeper look at the best attempts to solve the problem of intentionality. I begin this task by critically discussing past proposed solutions to P-NEG in light of (...) Russell’s debate with Demos. This reveals a central difficulty with addressing the problem, specifically that one cannot be committed to incompatibility facts in one’s account of negation and of the truth of negative truths. I then present an aboutness-based version of truthmaker theory. Utilising what I call the strict and full account of aboutness, I extract aboutness-based theories of truth and falsity. I use this machinery to present a promising new strategy for solving P-NEG which does not have the problems of alternative approaches. Finally, I present and respond to some potential objections. (shrink)

Subjunctive conditionals have their uses, but constituting the meaning of dispositional predicates is not one of them. More germane is the analysis of dispositions in terms of "bases"--except that past efforts to maintain an ontic gap between dispositions and their bases, while not wholly misguided, have failed to appreciate the semantic birthright of dispositional concepts as a species of theoretical construct in primitive science.

In the first part of this paper, we argue that the claim that a subject S believes that ϕ on the basis of good reasons cannot be the only type of explanation why S rationally believes that ϕ. Explaining attributions of rationality only by means of the notion of a belief being based on good reasons generates one version of the problem of regress of reasons. In the second part we flesh out a hypothesis according to which some beliefs are (...) rationally held by a subject S in virtue of the fact that S knows how to produce good reasons for holding them. In the third part we offer reasons for accepting the relevant hypothesis, and we argue that it is more successful than foundationalist, coherentist and infinitist theories in explaining the truth of some attributions of epistemic rationality. In the last part we address the problem of the regress of reasons and sketch a solution for it based on our hypothesis. (shrink)

As Price (2009) famously mused, if a philosopher were to be magically transported, perhaps through means of time travel, from the 1950s to the modern day, they would indeed be shocked by the resurgence of metaphysics in the analytic tradition. Most of all, perhaps, they would be shocked by the popularity of power metaphysics. What a strange item to have in a philosopher’s curriculum, they might think: after all, didn’t David Hume claim that “[t]here are no ideas which can occur (...) in metaphysics more obscure and uncertain than those of power, force, energy, or necessary connection”? Indeed, much has changed since then. At the pain of using overly vague terminology, we can call “power metaphysics” the subdiscipline of metaphysics interested in the development and evaluation of a family of positions which we will refer to under the umbrella term of “dispositionalism”. According to dispositionalists, the world we inhabit is also populated by genuine and irreducible powers, dispositions, and capacities of objects. (shrink)

Susan Mills and John Beatty's propensity interpretation of fitness encountered very different philosophical criticisms by Alexander Rosenberg and Kenneth Waters. These criticisms and the rejoinders to them are both predictable and important. They are predictable as raisingkinds of issues typically associated with disposition concepts (this is established through a systematic review of the problems generated by Carnap's dispositional interpretation of all scientific terms). They are important as referring the resolution of these issues to the development of evolutionary biology. This historical (...) approach to the propensity interpretation of fitness draws attention to the precarious relation between philosophical clarification of scientific concepts and any given state of the empirical arts. (shrink)

Les dispositions sont de plusieurs sortes (physiques, artefactuelles, psychologiques). Pour cerner ce genre d’entités, nous sommes contraints d’user de prédicats et d’expressions conditionnelles. Le problème métaphysique naît de la nature même des conditionnels contrefactuels qui n’aident pas à capturer complètement la réalité de ce genre de propriétés. Une distinction paraît s’imposer entre la base d’une disposition et ses manifestations, mais elle ouvre à de nouvelles difficultés évoquées ici. En termes contemporains, cette distinction pourrait se voir déplacée à travers la séparation (...) de l’attribut fonctionnel et du rôle causal strict. Mais il faut dans ce cas subordonner l’enquête métaphysique à une analyse conceptuelle. Il paraît donc qu’il n’est pas inutile de séparer les termes conceptuels des types de propriétés que nous envisageons. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss recent debates concerning etiological theories of functions. I defend an etiological theory against two criticisms, namely the ability to account for malfunction, and the problem of structural doubles. I then consider the arguments provided by Bigelow and Pargetter (1987) for a more forward looking account of functions as propensities or dispositions. I argue that their approach fails to address the explanatory problematic for which etiological theories were developed.

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, I give a brief account of the history of the debate on the problem of defining disposition concepts from its beginning in the late 1920s until today. This account is divided into four parts, corresponding with 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the paper, each of which deals with a major period of the debate. Section 2 reports up to the mid-1950s. Section 3 deals with important contributions to the discussion between 1955 (...) and 1958. However, the progress made around that time was far ahead of the logical theory and techniques which were needed for foundational reasons and for a better understanding of the basic notions. Some logical techniques appropriate for that aim were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though not uncontroversial, those logical techniques resulted in improvements of the insights gained in the mid-1950s; I shall report on those logical techniques and their application to the problem of defining disposition concepts in Section 4. In the early 1990s, however, the whole tradition of defining disposition concepts in terms of conditionals has been challenged by some strong counter-examples which are treated in Section 5. Finally, the second of the aims of this paper is explored in Section 6, in which I sketch very briefly the current stage of the debate by discussing and evaluating the most recent approaches to the subject. (shrink)

I argue that categorical realism, contrary to what most believe today, holds for quantum (and indeed for all) objects and substances. The main argument consists of two steps: (i) the recent experimental verification of the AB effect gives strong empirical evidence for taking quantum potentials as physically real (or substantival), which suggests a change of the data upon which any viable interpretation of quantum theory must rely, and (ii) quantum potentials may be consistently taken as the categorical properties of quantum (...) objects so that categorical realism can be restored. (shrink)

Can ‘disposition’ be understood as a contrast term, the contrast being ‘occurrence'? Put it another way: do ‘dispositional predicate’ and ‘occurrent predicate’ form a contrast pair? I shall show that if ‘occurrent’ is taken as simply meaning ‘non-dispositional', then ‘occurrent’ has no applications. However, if ‘occurrent’ is given an independent meaning so that predicates like ‘break', ‘bend', ‘disintegrate’ etc. are occurrent predicates, then it is not the contrast of ‘dispositional'. Its contrast is rather what I shall call ‘remainant’.

George Molnar’s contention that some dispositional properties are displayed without the aid of any activating conditions poses a challenge to the conditional analysis of dispositions. Since the invocation of activating conditions is regarded as a crucial feature of the analysis, spontaneous dispositions are believed to expose its inadequacy by eluding its scope. The challenge goes to the very heart of the conditional approach to dispositions, allegedly revealing a deep flaw in all its incarnations. Granting that there may be spontaneously manifestable (...) dispositions, I argue that the conditional analysis can successfully accommodate them by elevating the potential causal relation between a disposition and its manifestation. (shrink)

This chapter by Fisher continues the theme of the relation between Armstrong and Lewis, only Fisher casts the net far wider. He begins by arguing that there were at least two different lines of influence from early twentieth-century behaviourism to the identity theory: one through logical positivism and the other through ordinary language philosophy, the latter involving Place and Smart, and Lewis and Armstrong. It was Armstrong and Lewis who were to have a profound influence on subsequent developments in analytic (...) philosophy, both methodologically and in metaphysics, and it is for this reason that Fisher devotes the rest of his chapter to tracing the origins of their theories of mind and the manner in which the emphases and methodologies deployed in developing their respective theories became the hallmarks of their wider impact on analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This thesis proposes that key, competing theories of dispositions mistake and conflate how we identify, designate and talk about dispositions and dispositional terms for the nature of dispositions and the meaning of dispositional terms when they argue that: a) dispositions are extrinsic properties of their bearers (Boyle 1666) b) all properties are purely dispositional (Bird 2007) c) all properties are purely categorical (there are no dispositional properties) (Armstrong in AMP 1996) d) dispositional and categorical properties are separate and distinct properties (...) (Prior, Pargetter and Jackson 1982). In so doing these theories make unwarranted and unsupported ontological conclusions about dispositions. The thesis traces the principal source of this confusion and conflation to a reliance on the counterfactual analysis of dispositions that wrongly encourages the conflation of a disposition (say fragility) with its manifestation (shattering). There is good reason to hold that the counterfactual analysis of dispositions is false — the truth of a counterfactual statement (such as “if x were dropped x would break”) is neither necessary nor sufficient for the truth of a dispositional ascription (such as “x is fragile”). (shrink)

If dispositions are conceived as properties of systems that refer to possible causal relations, dispositions can be used in singular causal explanations. By means of these dispositional explanations, we can explain behavior B of a system x by (i) referring to a situation of type S that triggered B, given that x has a disposition D to do B in S, or (ii) by referring to a disposition D of x to do B in S, given that x is in (...) a situation of type S. Dispositional explanations are adequate and indispensable explanations: they can explain behavior B without explicitly referring to the underlying causal basis in x that constitutes a disposition to do B. Radical Behaviorist explanations are a sort of dispositional explanations, but the dispositional model is not restricted to these explanations. The dispositional model is compatible with, or can be applied to, several research programs. (shrink)

Determinism is the thesis that the state of the world at any time uniquely determines the state of the world at all future times. Our best scientific theories seem inconclusive as to whether our world is deterministic. Our world could very well be either partially or completely deterministic. But determinism is not as innocuous as it seems; the truth of determinism seems to come into conflict with many intuitive concepts. One such concept is objective chance. Our intuitive notions of objective (...) chances are tied to the belief that events could have turned out differently than the way they actually occurred. Though many philosophers have declared that this conception of objective chance is incompatible with deterministic worlds, some have tried to provide accounts that render the two compatible. In this thesis I investigate what a theory of deterministic chance could be. Working within certain metaphysical constraints on chance, I craft out a new dispositional account of chance grounded in properties that objects have. (shrink)

In a pragmatic approach to ontology, what is necessary and sufficient for the dispositional causation of events is interpreted realistically, and postulated to exist. This leads to a concept of `generic substance' (Aristotle's underlying `matter') as being constituted by dispositions, not just being the `bare subject' for those dispositions. If we describe the forms of objects according their spatiotemporal range, then this form is best viewed as a field, and substances themselves are best conceived as `fields of propensity'.