Abstract
It is held by some philosophers that it is possible that x has a disposition D but, if the stimulus condition obtains, it won’t manifest D because of an intrinsic interference. I will criticize this position on the ground that it has a deeply sceptical consequence, for instance, that, assuming that I am not well informed of the micro-properties of a metal coin, I do not know that it is not water-soluble. But I urge that this is beyond the pale, especially in light of the weight of the practical considerations we take when we use dispositional concepts in everyday life or science. In doing so, further, I will formulate a type of belief-forming inference and claim that it confers justification on commonsensical dispositional beliefs like the one that a metal coin isn’t water-soluble.
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Notes
A poisonous substance is always poisonous to a more or less degree. Some poisonous things are slightly poisonous but others are extremely poisonous. To avoid confusion, however, by ‘x is poisonous' I will mean that x is extremely poisonous.
The notion of intrinsic property employed in this paper can be approximately understood in line with any one of familiar definitions in the metaphysics of properties like the one often attributed to Kim (1982): a property P is an intrinsic property iff it is possible for a lonely object to be P. That is, an intrinsic property is compatible with loneliness, not implying accompaniment. Langton and Lewis (1998, 336–367) claim to improve on this definition by saying that intrinsic properties are independent of loneliness or accompaniment, not disjunctive properties, and not negations of disjunctive properties. But the present discussion doesn't rest on a particular way of defining intrinsic properties.
Of these two possibilities, I take it, the first spells a bigger epistemological difficulty for CD than the second. In addition, the first possibility has been the focus of recent discussions on dispositions, which is why I will concentrate on it in the subsequent discussion, setting aside the second possibility.
Cohen (2002) offers a concise summary of the problems and challenges faced by those who strive to understand the semantic properties of generic sentences.
For an excellent exposition of this point, see Bird (manuscript).
This example resembles Ashwell’s (2010, 636) example of a berry that has a poisonous content but, if ingested, wouldn’t kill because its skin is indigestible. In Ashwell’s example, the berry’s poisonous content and skin are spatially separated from each other even though they jointly constitute the berry. I can thus make explicit a notable difference between the two examples by supposing that BR’s lethal compound and antidote to this compound are thoroughly mixed together, so thoroughly that they can’t be spatially separated by any normal ways of ingesting. However hard one chews the rice grains, for instance, one won’t be killed by it. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing for this point.
On the ground that we have the unshakable conviction that aluminium is not corrosible, I have further argued in Choi (2012), this consequence of CD can be taken as a reductio basis for refuting it. It might be thought, however, that it is an open option to the CDist to dig the heels in and insist that aluminium is indeed corrosible. My subsequent discussion can then be seen as an attempt to demonstrate that even this bite-the-bullet option is not a viable one for the CDist.
It is generally known as the ‘Closure Argument' expressed in an evidentialist guise. Dodd (2012) lately suggests that the Closure Argument is the most powerful argument, among those discussed by contemporary epistemologists, for scepticism from an evidentialist perspective.
Consider the definition of suitably qualified possible worlds Alvin Goldman, a behemoth reliabilist, puts forward in his influential book Epistemology and Cognition. Goldman there has it that suitably qualified possible worlds are what he calls normal worlds, those worlds that fit our general beliefs about the actual world: to a very first approximation, a given process type is reliable in the actual world iff it has a sufficiently high ratio of truth versus falsehood in normal worlds (Goldman 1986). On the assumption of CD, BR in the possible worlds where H is true is poisonous but has precisely the same phenomenal or manifest properties as it actually has. If so, what non-specialists generally believe about BR would hold true in these possible worlds, and hence they qualify as normal worlds. This confirms my suggestion that it is reasonable to suppose that, for the CDist, H describes a suitably qualified possibility.
This objection was brought to my attention by Sunwoo Hwan.
I am indebted to an anonymous referee for bringing this objection to my attention.
For a good overview of the nature of natural kind, see (Bird and Tobin 2015).
What if ontological parsimony is understood in terms of the number of individual things postulated—the so-called quantitative parsimony? First let me note that this isn’t a standard reading of ontological parsimony. Lewis (1973, 97), for example, claims that he ‘recognizes no presumption whatsoever in favour of’ it though Nolan (1997) and Baker (2003) dispute this claim. No matter what one may have to say about the theoretical value of quantitative parsimony, however, it can’t be used to differentiate between H and H*. For, as long as H* is reasonably taken not to deny that BR is composed of atoms and molecules, it is no more quantitatively parsimonious than H.
This response has been brought to my attention by Simon Langford.
This example is due to Sorensen (2012).
On epistemic contextualism, this must be qualified by the additional assumption that the error possibility in question is contextually salient: we aren't prevented from knowing that the substance is water by that error possibility provided that it isn't salient in the context of knowledge attribution.
Note that, despite the CDist's consequence that non-specialists don't know that BR isn't poisonous, they typically take themselves to know it. On the one hand, most people in the street will be likely to concede that, on the assumption that John is a borderline case with respect to the property of obesity, they don't know whether John is obese or not, which sets a limit to the depth of analogy between the two cases. On the other hand, however, non-specialists typically do attribute to themselves the knowledge of the watery substance W's being water, which parallels the fact that they typically attribute to themselves the knowledge of BR's not being poisonous. For this reason, I take it that the present example gives a better analogical support to the CDist's sceptical consequence that non-specialists don't know that BR isn't poisonous.
I hope this idea is pretty incontrovertible. It is often suggested that things have dispositional properties in virtue of their base properties, those properties thought to ‘ground' the dispositional properties (Prior et al. 1982; Armstrong et al. 1996). Does this suggestion contradict the idea under consideration? Not necessarily. When something x is claimed to have a set of base properties for a disposition D, we may well naturally interpret it to mean that the base properties ground the disposition D by making it the case that x would possibly exhibit some distinctive behaviours. The micro-properties of the table salt, for example, ground its water-solubility by making it the case that it would possibly dissolve in water. On this interpretation, there is no conflict between x's having D in virtue of the corresponding possible behaviours and x's having D in virtue of the corresponding base properties.
I will give a detailed characterization of these cases later.
It is remarkable that the present reasoning is not purely transcendental but based on empirical hypotheses regarding what kind of beings we, the possessors of conventional dispositional concepts, are, one of which is that we are a kind of beings that constantly face practical problems to survive in a hostile environment. This leaves open the possibility that my criticism of CD doesn't go through when it is applied to beings very different from us, for instance, those who don't face such practical problems at all.
Clarke (2010, 156–157, footnote 3), an ardent defender of CD, explicitly concedes that he does not know how to draw a line between the two types of disposition.
Here I do not suggest that CD in and of itself is committed to psychological behaviourism. What I suggest is that Harboured Hatred can be used to defend CD from my charge of skepticism only if psychological behaviourism is assumed. For, it is based on the observation that we can’t decide if John hates me or not merely by attending to his behaviours. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing for this point.
One key characteristic of a natural kind that will be brought up in the following is that they are apt to ground legitimate inductive inferences regarding its members, in which sense dividing things into natural kinds is said to be essential to the inductive component of science. Notably, though, it is observed that an inductive inference can be underpinned not only by what we normally take as a natural kind but also by a group of things that share a natural property in a suitable sense of ‘natural property'. But some philosophers like Quine (1969) maintain that what is suggested by this observation is merely that we should take a more liberal, less restrictive, conception of natural kind according to which, whenever things share an induction-supporting property, they make up a natural kind. Nothing in this paper will turn on this issue, though.
The verb ‘is' in P2 must be deemed as being tenseless. Thus P2 can be alternatively written as ‘No healthy person was or is or will be ever killed simply by eating rice only'.
Remarkably sugar had been regarded as being good for health or at least benign to health until modern food science recently unleashed its major capacities and debunked this piece of ‘folk science'. A few decades ago Coca-Cola, which then contained a lot of refined sugar, was advertised as a healthy beverage that gives body ‘essential' sugar.
‘DKK' is short for ‘Dispositions, Knowledge, and Kinds'.
An intrinsic disposition, which may be more aptly called ‘nomically intrinsic disposition’, is a disposition that supervenes on the intrinsic properties of its bearers except in so far as it depends on the laws of nature (Lewis 1997, 138–139). So, an intrinsic disposition is shared by objects that have all the intrinsic properties in common and are subject to the same laws of nature. When I speak of intrinsic duplicates, therefore, they are strictly nomically intrinsic duplicates in the sense in which they are subject to the same laws of nature.
The idea that all dispositions supervene on the intrinsic properties of their bearers is endorsed by a number of metaphysicians including Armstrong (1973), Lewis (1997), Molnar (2003), and Menzies (2009). But it is challenged by McKitrick (2003) who claims that some dispositions are extrinsic to their bearers. Despite McKitrick's challenge, however, there is still a widespread consensus among metaphysicians of dispositions that, when properly understood, standard paradigmatic dispositions such as water-solubility, flammability, and elasticity are plausibly intrinsic. See (Choi 2005, 500, fn 12), (Bird 2007, 31), (Manley and Wasserman 2007, 71; 2008, 61, fn 4), and (Ashwell 2010, 639).
It is to be admitted that an intrinsic duplicate of BR* situated in the presence of an antidote-removing angel would kill if ingested. We are tempted to think, though, that it is thanks to the angel's interference that the intrinsic duplicate would kill if ingested and therefore our intuition isn't swung in favour of its being poisonous. This means that the intrinsic duplicate in question can't be used to set off the intrinsic duplicate reasoning for BR*'s being poisonous.
For a discussion of the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic interferers with respect to the intrinsic duplicate reasoning, see also Bird manuscript and Choi (2005).
Here I don't mean that no arguments have ever been given for the possibility of intrinsic interferers with dispositions. Clarke (2008), for example, presents what he calls ‘the constitution test', by which he attempts to derive the possibility of intrinsic interferers with dispositions from the principle that, for many dispositions D, x's having D is constituted by some but not all of x's underlying microstructural properties. I won't discuss Clarke's constitution test in detail here to avoid a long digression. Nonetheless, though, it is worth remarking that the credibility of Clarke's constitution test isn't widely agreed upon among metaphysicians, at least not as widely as the intrinsic duplicate reasoning. A view of dispositions that is in stark conflict with Clarke's constitution test has been put forward, for instance, by Handfield (2008, 302) who says: ‘for all dispositional properties D, the supervenience base of D includes all possible intrinsic properties… any intrinsic change to the bearer is a change in the pattern of instantiation in the base of the disposition' (Handfield's italics). In contrast with the intrinsic duplicate reasoning, thus, Clarke's constitution test isn't generally endorsed among metaphysicians, which is why I think that the second can't have as much of dialectical force as the first; and hence that the first, if it were ever successfully carried out for the possibility of intrinsic interferers with dispositions, might be taken to be powerful enough to counterbalance my charge of scepticism against CD but this is not the case for the second.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Lauren Ashwell and Randolph Clarke for giving valuable advice about earlier drafts of this paper. I am also indebted to the anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for their helpful and constructive comments. This work was supported by a grant from Kyung Hee University in 2012 (KHU-20120798).
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Choi, S. Intrinsic Interferers and the Epistemology of Dispositions. Erkenn 82, 199–232 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9813-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9813-y