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Dispositions

Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press (1998)

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  1. Categoricalism Versus Dispositionalism: A Case Study in Metametaphysics.Cord Friebe - 2014 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 45 (1):5-15.
    Using meta-metaphysical instruments, the paper analyzes the dispute between ‘reductionist’ Humean categoricalism and ‘bold’ Anti-Humean dispositionalism. It is argued that both views are non-Quinean, hence, heavyweight ontological realisms: careful analysis of specific scientific theories alone is not sufficient. Further, sophisticated philosophical reasoning is needed to defend Anti-Humeanism as well as Humeanism. The paper finally suggests that most if not all ontological disputes are unavoidably “speculative” due to essentialism which cannot be read off contemporary physical theories.
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  • Why pan-dispositionalism is incompatible with metaphysical naturalism.Travis Dumsday - 2015 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 78 (1):107-122.
    Pan-dispositionalism is one of the major theories in current analytic metaphysics concerning dispositional properties and how they relate to categorical properties. According to pan-dispositionalists, all fundamental properties are dispositional in nature, such that any supposed categorical properties are either unreal or reducible in some way to the dispositional. I argue that if pan-dispositionalism is true then metaphysical naturalism is false. To the extent that one finds pan-dispositionalism a plausible theory, one ought to question the truth of metaphysical naturalism. On the (...)
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  • The Truthmaking Argument Against Dispositionalism.Christopher J. Austin - 2014 - Ratio 28 (3):271-285.
    According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being (...)
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  • Pluralists about Pluralism? Versions of Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry.Jeroen Van Bouwel - 2014 - In Thomas Uebel (ed.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 105-119.
    In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...)
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  • Miracles and two accounts of scientific laws.Steven Horst - 2014 - Zygon 49 (2):323-347.
    Since early modernity, it has often been assumed that miracles are incompatible with the existence of the natural laws utilized in the sciences. This paper argues that this assumption is largely an artifact of empiricist accounts of laws that should be rejected for reasons internal to philosophy of science, and that no such incompatibility arises on the most important alternative interpretations, which treat laws as expressions of forces, dispositions, or causal powers.
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  • Agents and Causes: Dispositional Intuitions As a Guide to Causal Structure.Ralf Mayrhofer & Michael R. Waldmann - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (1):65-95.
    Currently, two frameworks of causal reasoning compete: Whereas dependency theories focus on dependencies between causes and effects, dispositional theories model causation as an interaction between agents and patients endowed with intrinsic dispositions. One important finding providing a bridge between these two frameworks is that failures of causes to generate their effects tend to be differentially attributed to agents and patients regardless of their location on either the cause or the effect side. To model different types of error attribution, we augmented (...)
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  • A Précis of Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation.Alan Millar - 2007 - SWIF Philosophy of Mind 6 (1).
    The article provides a summary of the author's book Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). It details three areas in which the notion of a normative commitment is made central. These are (1) believing and intending, (2) practices conceived as essentially rule-governed activities, and (3) meaning and concepts. An account is given of how we may best explain the commitments incurred by beliefs and intentions. It is held that those states are themselves essentially normative. A problem (...)
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  • Don't Ask, Look! Linguistic Corpora as a Tool for Conceptual Analysis.Roland Bluhm - 2013 - In Miguel Hoeltje, Thomas Spitzley & Wolfgang Spohn (eds.), Was dürfen wir glauben? Was sollen wir tun? Sektionsbeiträge des achten internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie e.V. DuEPublico. pp. 7-15.
    Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...)
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  • A formal ontology of artefacts.Gilles Kassel - 2010 - Applied ontology 5 (3):223-246.
    This article presents a formal ontology which accounts for the general nature of artefacts. The objective is to help structure application ontologies in areas where specific artefacts are present - in other words, virtually any area of activity. The conceptualization relies on recent philosophical and psychological research on artefacts, having resulted in a largely consensual theoretical basis. Furthermore, this ontology of artefacts extends the foundational DOLCE ontology and supplements its axiomatization. The conceptual primitives are as follows: artificial entity, intentional production (...)
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  • Molecular Interactions. On the Ambiguity of Ordinary Statements in Biomedical Literature.Stefan Schulz & Ludger Jansen - 2009 - Applied ontology (4):21-34.
    Statements about the behavior of biochemical entities (e.g., about the interaction between two proteins) abound in the literature on molecular biology and are increasingly becoming the targets of information extraction and text mining techniques. We show that an accurate analysis of the semantics of such statements reveals a number of ambiguities that have to be taken into account in the practice of biomedical ontology engineering: Such statements can not only be understood as event reporting statements, but also as ascriptions of (...)
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  • Metaphysics of causation and physics of general relativity.Vincent Lam - 2010 - Humana Mente 4 (13):61-80.
    This paper aims to discuss two realist conceptions about causation in the light of the general theory of relativity. I first consider the conserved quantity of causation, which explicitly relies on the energy conservation principle. Such principle is however problematic within GTR, mainly because of the dynamical nature of the spacetime structure itself. I then turn to the causal theory of properties, according to which properties are such that insofar as they are certain qualities, they are powers to produce certain (...)
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  • The Second Somatic Revolution1.Brenda Farnell & Charles R. Varela - 2008 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 38 (3):215-240.
    This paper proposes a dynamic theory of embodiment that aims to get beyond the absent moving body in embodied social theory. The first somatic revolution, inspired by Merleau Ponty, provided theories based on the feeling and experience of the body. The theory of dynamic embodiment focuses instead on the doing itself as embodied social action, in which the embodied person is fore-grounded as a complex resource for meaning making. This represents a theoretical enrichment of the earlier turn to the body (...)
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  • Married Causes.Jeff Engelhardt - 2014 - Acta Analytica 29 (2):161-180.
    Many philosophers accept some version of a principle that says for all x, if x exists, then x plays a unique causal role. After briefly clarifying one version of the principle in Section 1, Section 2 gives reasons to doubt it by showing that there are non-identical “causal indiscernibles”—I call them “married causes.” Section 3 then sketches a few philosophical puzzles for which married causes may be helpful.
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  • Truthmakers and the Direct Argument.Charles Hermes - 2013 - Philosophical Studies (2):401-418.
    The truthmaker literature has recently come to the consensus that the logic of truthmaking is distinct from classical propositional logic. This development has huge implications for the free will literature. Since free will and moral responsibility are primarily ontological concerns (and not semantic concerns) the logic of truthmaking ought to be central to the free will debate. I shall demonstrate that counterexamples to transfer principles employed in the direct argument occur precisely where a plausible logic of truthmaking diverges from classical (...)
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  • Why metrical properties are not powers.Andreas Bartels - 2013 - Synthese 190 (12):2001-2013.
    What has the dispositional analysis of properties and laws (e.g. Molnar, Powers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003; Mumford, Laws in nature, Routledge London, 2004; Bird, Nature’s metaphysics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007) to offer to the scientific understanding of physical properties?—The article provides an answer to this question for the case of spacetime points and their metrical properties in General Relativity. The analysis shows that metrical properties are not ‘powers’, i.e. they cannot be understood as producing the effects of spacetime on (...)
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  • Properties: Qualities, Powers, or Both?Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (1):55-80.
    Powers are popularly assumed to be distinct from, and dependent upon, inert qualities, mainly because it is believed that qualities have their nature independently of other properties while powers have their nature in virtue of a relation to distinct manifestation property. George Molnar and Alexander Bird, on the other hand, characterize powers as intrinsic and relational. The difficulties of reconciling the characteristics of being intrinsic and at the same time essentially related are illustrated in this paper and it is argued (...)
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  • Dispositions and Ethics.Rani Lill Anjum, Svein Anders Noer Lie & Stephen Mumford - manuscript
    What is the connection between dispositions and ethics? Some might think very little and those who are interested in dispositions tend to be metaphysicians whose interests are far from value. However, we argue in this paper that dispositions and dispositionality are central to ethics, indeed a precondition. Ethics rests on a number of notions that are either dispositional in nature or involve real dispositions or powers at work. We argue for a dispositional account of value that offers an alternative to (...)
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  • Can bare dispositions explain categorical regularities?Tyler Hildebrand - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):569-584.
    One of the traditional desiderata for a metaphysical theory of laws of nature is that it be able to explain natural regularities. Some philosophers have postulated governing laws to fill this explanatory role. Recently, however, many have attempted to explain natural regularities without appealing to governing laws. Suppose that some fundamental properties are bare dispositions. In virtue of their dispositional nature, these properties must be (or are likely to be) distributed in regular patterns. Thus it would appear that an ontology (...)
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  • The Propensity Interpretation of Fitness and the Propensity Interpretation of Probability.Isabelle Drouet & Francesca Merlin - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (S3):457-468.
    The paper provides a new critical perspective on the propensity interpretation of fitness, by investigating its relationship to the propensity interpretation of probability. Two main conclusions are drawn. First, the claim that fitness is a propensity cannot be understood properly: fitness is not a propensity in the sense prescribed by the propensity interpretation of probability. Second, this interpretation of probability is inessential for explanations proposed by the PIF in evolutionary biology. Consequently, interpreting the probabilistic dimension of fitness in terms of (...)
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  • The Regress of Pure Powers Revisited.Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson - 2012 - European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3):529-541.
    The paper aims to elucidate in better detail than before the dispute about whether or not dispositional monism—the view that all basic properties are pure powers—entails a vicious infinite regress. Particular focus is on Alexander Bird's and George Molnar's attempts to show that the arguments professing to demonstrate a vicious regress are inconclusive because they presuppose what they aim to prove, notably that powers are for their nature dependent on something else. I argue that Bird and Molnar are mistaken. It (...)
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  • Belief Ascription and Context Dependence.David Hunter - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (12):902-911.
    This article considers the question whether belief ascriptions exhibit context dependence. I first distinguish two potential forms of context dependence in belief ascription. Propositional context dependence concerns what the subject believes, whereas attitudinal context dependence concerns what it is to believe a proposition. I then discuss three potential sources of PCD and two potential sources of ACD. Given the nature of this article, my discussion will provide only an overview of these various forms and sources of context dependence. Along the (...)
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  • Recent Work on Motivational Internalism.Fredrik Björklund, Gunnar Björnsson, John Eriksson, Ragnar Francén Olinder & Caj Strandberg - 2012 - Analysis 72 (1):124-137.
    Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.
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  • The Essence of Dispositional Essentialism.David Yates - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1):93-128.
    Dispositional essentialists argue that physical properties have their causal roles essentially. This is typically taken to mean that physical properties are identical to dispositions. I argue that this is untenable, and that we must instead say that properties bestow dispositions. I explore what it is for a property to have such a role essentially. Dispositional essentialists argue for their view by citing certain epistemological and metaphysical implications, and I appeal to these implications to place desiderata on the concept of essence (...)
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  • On ‘Stabilising’ medical mechanisms, truth-makers and epistemic causality: a critique to Williamson and Russo’s approach.Stefan Dragulinescu - 2012 - Synthese 187 (2):785-800.
    In this paper I offer an anti-Humean critique to Williamson and Russo’s approach to medical mechanisms. I focus on one of the specific claims made by Williamson and Russo, namely the claim that micro-structural ‘mechanisms’ provide evidence for the stability across populations of causal relationships ascertained at the (macro-) level of (test) populations. This claim is grounded in the epistemic account of causality developed by Williamson, an account which—while not relying exclusively on mechanistic evidence for justifying causal judgements—appeals nevertheless to (...)
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  • How Successful is Naturalism?Georg Gasser (ed.) - 2007 - Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.
    The aim of the present volume is to draw the balance of naturalism's success so far.
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  • (1 other version)Dispositions, Laws, and Categories.Ludger Jansen - 2007 - Metaphysica 8 (2):211-220.
    After a short sketch of Lowe’s account of his four basic categories, I discuss his theory of formal ontological relations and how Lowe wants to account for dispositional predications. I argue that on the ontic level Lowe is a pan-categoricalist, while he is a language dualist and an exemplification dualist with regard to the dispositional/categorical distinction. I argue that Lowe does not present an adequate account of disposition. From an Aristotelian point of view, Lowe conflates dispositional predication with hôs epi (...)
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  • Moral Reality: A Defence of Moral Realism.Caj Strandberg - 2004 - Lund University.
    The main aim of this thesis is to defend moral realism. In chapter 1, I argue that moral realism is best understood as the view that moral sentences have truth-value, there are moral properties that make some moral sentences true, and moral properties are not reducible to non- moral properties. Realism is contrasted with non-cognitivism, error-theory and reductionism, which, in brief, deny, and, respectively. In the introductory chapter, it is also argued that there are some prima facie reasons to assume (...)
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  • Do Extrinsic Dispositions Need Extrinsic Causal Bases?Gabriele Contessa - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3):622-638.
    In this paper, I distinguish two often-conflated theses—the thesis that all dispositions are intrinsic properties and the thesis that the causal bases of all dispositions are intrinsic properties—and argue that the falsity of the former does not entail the falsity of the latter. In particular, I argue that extrinsic dispositions are a counterexample to first thesis but not necessarily to the second thesis, because an extrinsic disposition does not need to include any extrinsic property in its causal basis. I conclude (...)
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  • Two ways to understand causality in agency.Rowland Stout - 2007 - In Anton Leist (ed.), Action in Context. De Gruyter.
    An influential philosophical conception of our mind’s place in the world is as a site for the states and events that causally mediate the world we perceive and the world we affect. According to this conception, states and events in the world cause mental states and events in us through the process of perception. These mental states and events then go on to produce new states and events in the world through the process of action. Our role is as hosts (...)
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  • Opposing powers.Randolph Clarke - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 149 (2):153 - 160.
    A disposition mask is something that prevents a disposition from manifesting despite the occurrence of that disposition’s characteristic stimulus, and without eliminating that disposition. Several authors have maintained that masks must be things extrinsic to the objects that have the masked dispositions. Here it is argued that this is not so; masks can be intrinsic to the objects whose dispositions they mask. If that is correct, then a recent attempt to distinguish dispositional properties from so-called categorical properties fails.
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  • Dispositions and subjunctives.Jesse R. Steinberg - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (3):323 - 341.
    It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called “masked dispositions” and “finkish dispositions”). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to Φ when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would Φ ceteris paribus . I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised (...)
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  • The Nature of Appearance in Kant’s Transcendentalism: A Seman- tico-Cognitive Analysis.Sergey L. Katrechko - 2018 - Kantian Journal 37 (3):41-55.
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  • Dispositionality: Beyond The Biconditionals.David Manley - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2):321 - 334.
    Suppose dispositions bear a distinctive connection to counterfactual facts, perhaps one that could be enshrined in a variation on the well-worn schema "Necessarily, x is disposed to phi in psi iff x would phi in psi. Could we exploit this connection to provide an account of what it is to be a disposition? This paper is about four views of dispositionality that attempt to do so.
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  • Modal truthmakers and two varieties of actualism.Gabriele Contessa - 2010 - Synthese 174 (3):341 - 353.
    In this paper, I distinguish between two varieties of actualism—hardcore actualism and softcore actualism—and I critically discuss Ross Cameron’s recent arguments for preferring a softcore actualist account of the truthmakers for modal truths over hardcore actualist ones. In the process, I offer some arguments for preferring the hardcore actualist account of modal truthmakers over the softcore actualist one.
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  • (1 other version)The role of dispositions in explanations.Agustín Vicente - 2010 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 19 (3):301-310.
    According to a model defended by some authors, dispositional concepts can be legitimately used in causal explanations, although such a use is not necessary. I argue, however, that there is a kind of use of dispositions in explanations that does not fall within this model: we will miss some explanations if we forsake dispositional concepts and explanations.
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  • Functionalism.Janet Levin - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only (...)
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  • (1 other version)Dispositions.Michael Fara - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The glass vase on my desk is fragile. It should be handled with care because it it is likely to shatter or crack if it is knocked, dropped, or otherwise treated roughly. The vase has certain dispositions, for example the disposition to shatter when dropped. But what is this disposition? It seems on the one hand to be a perfectly real property, a genuine respect of similarity common to glass vases, china cups, ancient manuscripts, and anything else fragile. Yet on (...)
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  • Dispositions, relational properties and the quantum world.Mauro Dorato - 2017 - In Maximilien Kistler (ed.), Dispositions and Causal Powers, Routledge, 2017,. London: Routledge. pp. pp.249-270..
    In this paper I examine the role of dispositional properties in the most frequently discussed interpretations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. After offering some motivation for this project, I briefly characterize the distinction between non-dispositional and dispositional properties in the context of quantum mechanics by suggesting a necessary condition for dispositionality – namely contextuality – and, consequently, a sufficient condition for non-dispositionality, namely non-contextuality. Having made sure that the distinction is conceptually sound, I then analyze the plausibility of the widespread, monistic (...)
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  • How dispositions can be causally relevant.Agustin Vicente - 2002 - Erkenntnis 56 (3):329-344.
    The problem this paper deals with is the problem of how dispositional properties can have causal relevance. In particular, the paper is focused on the question of how dispositions can have causal relevance given that the categorial bases that realise them seem to be sufficient to bring about the effects that dispositions explain. I show first that this problem of exclusion has no general solution. Then, I discuss some particular cases in which dispositions are causally relevant, despite of this exclusion (...)
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  • Dispositions and habituals.Michael Fara - 2005 - Noûs 39 (1):43–82.
    Objects have dispositions. As Nelson Goodman put it, “a thing is full of threats and promises”. But sometimes those threats go unfulfilled, and the promises unkept. Sometimes the dispositions of objects fail to manifest themselves, even when their conditions of manifestation obtain. Pieces of wood, disposed to burn when heated, do not burn when heated in a vacuum chamber. And pastries, disposed to go bad when left lying around too long, won’t do so if coated with lacquer and put on (...)
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  • Dispositions and ceteris paribus laws.Alice Drewery - 2001 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (4):723-733.
    This paper discusses the relationship between dispositions and laws and the prospects for any analysis of talk of laws in terms of talk of dispositions. Recent attempts at such a reduction have often been motivated by the desire to give an account of ceteris paribus laws and in this they have had some success. However, such accounts differ as to whether they view dispositions as properties fundamentally of individuals or of kinds. I argue that if dispositions are properties of individuals, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Necessarily, salt dissolves in water.Alexander Bird - 2001 - Analysis 61 (4):267–274.
    In this paper I aim to show that a certain law of nature, namely that common salt (sodium chloride) dissolves in water, is metaphysically necessary. The importance of this result is that it conflicts with a widely shared intuition that the laws of nature (most if not all) are contingent. There have been debates over whether some laws, such as Newton’s second law, might be definitional of their key terms and hence necessary. But the law that salt dissolves in water (...)
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  • Patterns of abduction.Gerhard Schurz - 2008 - Synthese 164 (2):201-234.
    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 (...)
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  • Kinds, essences, powers.Stephen Mumford - 2005 - Ratio 18 (4):420–436.
    What is the new essentialist asking us to accept? Not that there are natural kinds, nor that there are intrinsic causal powers. These things could be accepted without a commitment to essentialism. They are asking us to accept something akin to the Kripke‐Putnam position: a metaphysical theory about kind‐membership in virtue of essential properties. But Salmon has shown that there is no valid argument for the Kripke‐Putnam position: no valid inference that gets us from reference to essence. Why then should (...)
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  • The semantics and ontology of dispositions.D. H. Mellor - 2000 - Mind 109 (436):757--780.
    The paper looks at the semantics and ontology of dispositions in the light of recent work on the subject. Objections to the simple conditionals apparently entailed by disposition statements are met by replacing them with so-called 'reduction sentences' and some implications of this are explored. The usual distinction between categorical and dispositional properties is criticised and the relation between dispositions and their bases examined. Applying this discussion to two typical cases leads to the conclusion that fragility is not a real (...)
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  • Capacities, explanation and the possibility of disunity.Jakob Hohwy - 2003 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17 (2):179 – 190.
    Nancy Cartwright argues that so-called capacities, not universal laws of nature, best explain the often complex way events actually unfold. On this view, science would represent a world that is fundamentally "dappled", or disunified, and not, as orthodoxy would perhaps have it, a world unified by universal laws of nature. I argue, first, that the problem Cartwright raises for laws of nature seems to arise for capacities too, so why reject laws of nature? Second, that in so far as there (...)
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  • Dispositions and normal conditions.Jan Hauska - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 139 (2):219 - 232.
    It is agreed on all hands that the original version of the conditional analysis of dispositions is defeated by so-called finks and maskers. Some have responded to this predicament by contending that the counterfactual on the right-hand side of the analysis should be expected to hold only when the property it purports to describe is in normal conditions. The essay argues that at the end of the day this idea must presuppose that one is able to arrive at specific descriptions (...)
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  • Unfinkable dispositions.Toby Handfield - 2008 - Synthese 160 (2):297 - 308.
    This paper develops two ideas with respect to dispositional properties: (1) Adapting a suggestion of Sungho Choi, it appears the conceptual distinction between dispositional and categorical properties can be drawn in terms of susceptibility to finks and antidotes. Dispositional, but not categorical properties, are not susceptible to intrinsic finks, nor are they remediable by intrinsic antidotes. (2) If correct, this suggests the possibility that some dispositions—those which lack any causal basis—may be insusceptible to any fink or antidote. Since finks and (...)
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  • Twenty-one arguments against propensity analyses of probability.Antony Eagle - 2004 - Erkenntnis 60 (3):371–416.
    I argue that any broadly dispositional analysis of probability will either fail to give an adequate explication of probability, or else will fail to provide an explication that can be gainfully employed elsewhere (for instance, in empirical science or in the regulation of credence). The diversity and number of arguments suggests that there is little prospect of any successful analysis along these lines.
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  • What is a disposition?Troy Cross - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):321-41.
    Attempts to capture the distinction between categorical and dispositional states in terms of more primitive modal notions – subjunctive conditionals, causal roles, or combinatorial principles – are bound to fail. Such failure is ensured by a deep symmetry in the ways dispositional and categorical states alike carry modal import. But the categorical/dispositional distinction should not be abandoned; it underpins important metaphysical disputes. Rather, it should be taken as a primitive, after which the doomed attempts at reductive explanation can be transformed (...)
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