Abstract
This paper aims to defend that the best framework for characterizing dispositions is a Rylean, non-factualist dispositionalism. I follow Tugby (Mind, 122 (486), 451–480, 2013) in explaining which are the main candidates for characterizing the ontology of dispositions. Tugby (Mind, 122 (486), 451–480, 2013) concludes that the best metaphysical framework for characterizing dispositions is Platonism, because it is the only theory that can account for the central and the intrinsic platitudes. Following this I show that Platonism (which postulates the existence of non-natural, trascendent universals) is not desirable because it is difficult to reconcile with ontological naturalism and because it is not parsimonious. Thus, I offer a different candidate: Rylean non-factualist dispositionalism. This approach retains the explanatory power of our dispositional vocabulary without appealing to facts, entities, or properties. In conclusion, non-factualist dispositionalism is preferable over naturalism and Platonism for characterizing dispositions.
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Notes
Tugby (2013: 473) addresses the issue of parsimony by appealing to Lewis (1973): “Since Platonism commits us to a nonspatiotemporal realm of being, it could be said that it offends qualitative parsimony. The strength of the argument under consideration is therefore likely to rest on whether it is quantitative or qualitative parsimony that is more sacrosanct. And notoriously, metaphysicians such as Lewis (1973) have argued that it is qualitative and not quantitative parsimony that is more important”. Here I am not going to argue in favour of qualitative or quantitative parsimony, because I think that there could be cases in which each kind of parsimony could be compatible with naturalism if that combination is explanatory. However, here I strongly reject Platonism because it is lesser economic in a pernicious way. It is pernicious because it postulates the existence of entities that are non-natural and transcendent, which is clearly incompatible with ontological naturalism.
Martin (2008: 20) offers an exhaustive differentiation between three kinds of dispositions. First, he claims that there are dispositions that can be lost and recovered, such as “[b]eing soluble in water, where the dissolution manifestation loses the solubility in the solution, but the solubility is recoverable by evaporation of that solution”. The second kind of dispositions includes those that are lost when manifested (for example, the disposition of being explosive, that is lost when manifested). And third, there is a kind of disposition that remains even when it is manifested, like that of “[b]eing stable, which can persist before, during, and after its manifestation” (Martin 2008:20).
This notion is compatible with the standard one, which claims that dispositionalism is the position that accepts that some properties are dispositional (Choi and Fara 2012/2014).
An anonymous referee urged me to consider that ‘anti-realism’ may be a misleading label, since it is also committed to the existence of dispositions as properties as well: it is just a thesis on the relation between evidence and ontology, as Mumford puts it, but not a dispute with realism about the ontological status of dispositions. I agree with the referee and I accept that the label may be misleading, although I decided to maintain it since key publications and authors in metaphysics use the label, like Mumford (1998) or Martin (2008).
Here I follow the widely accepted idea that dispositions are individuated by their manifestation. Alternatively, some dispositional realists, such as Martin (2008), defend that dispositions are individuated by their relatedness to their reciprocal dispositional partners.
Here I will not delve into the ways in which this notion of ‘resemblance’ should be understood because this issue is different from the purpose of this paper. For more information on how tropism is understood, see Daly (1994).
Tugby (2013) claims that universalism is more economic than tropism because it postulates a smaller number of properties. However, it is clear that commitment to transcendent universals makes universalism unsuited for ontological naturalism.
Categorical’ should not be understood in terms of categorical properties; this is, as opposed to ‘dispositional’ in philosophy. As Martin (2008: 44) claims: “Philosophers commonly distinguish dispositional and categorical properties. Dispositional properties are taken to endow their possessors with particular dispositions or powers; categorical properties are thought to endow objects with nondispositional qualities. Some philosophers have denied the existence of categorical properties, arguing that every property is purely dispositional (see, for instance, Mellor 1974; and Shoemaker 1980). Others deny dispositional properties Instead, the term ‘categorical’ in this context should be understood as a kind or type of statement that exhausts in a very distinctive syntactical way how things are to be described, just like the reductive conditional analysis criticized by Martin (2008), for example.
The discussion on the explanatory power of the reductive conditional analysis is quite wide and fruitful, and one key example is the debate on the explanatory power of reductive analyses. The main idea is that the behaviour of a disposition can be reduced to a single hypothetical statement of a very distinctive form (“An object x is disposed to M when C iff x has an intrinsic property B such that, if it were the case that C and if x were to retain B for a sufficient time, then C and B would jointly cause x to M”, Choi and Fara 2012/2014). Even when dispositional anti-realists reformulated the conditional analysis in order to make it more sophisticated and explanatory (Lewis 1997), the critique of the dispositional realists to this idea is that, in order to understand any conditional analysis of dispositions, one must be previously committed to the existence of causal powers (Martin 2008). Also, anti-realists do not take into consideration cases in which a disposition is possessed by the bearer that persist before, during and after its manifestation, such as it happens with ‘being stable’ (Molnar 2003: Chapter 4, Martin 2008: 20). In conclusion, all kinds of conditional explanations are dependent on a previous commitment with causal powers, but not vice-versa, like anti-realists suggest. For further development, see Martin (2008: 12–24).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to face these metaphysical problems from a Rylean perspective.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting me to explicitly address this claim in the paper.
Again, thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me to deal with these problems.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was partially funded by the Universidad de Granada under a Contrato Puente Postdoctoral Fellowship and by the research project “Naturalism, Expressivism, and Normativity” (FFI2013-44836). I am thankful to two anonymous referees and to Manuel de Pinedo, Neftalí Villanueva, María José Frápolli, Josep L. Prades, and Nemesio García-Carril Puy for helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this paper.
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Heras-Escribano, M. Non-Factualist Dispositionalism. Philosophia 45, 607–629 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9784-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9784-x