Abstract
This paper examines the need for static dispositions within the basic ontology of the powers view of properties. To lend some focus, Neil Williams’s well developed case for static dispositions is considered. While his arguments are not necessarily intended to address fundamental ontology, they still provide a useful starting point, a springboard for diving into the deeper metaphysical waters of the dispositionalist approach. Within that ontological context, this paper contends that Williams’s arguments fail to establish the need to posit static dispositions, or at least any sort not already well appreciated by advocates of the powers view. The paper then proceeds to suggest an alternative motivation for positing static dispositions, the success of which depends greatly on which ontological approach to objects is paired with the powers view.
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Notes
Throughout this paper, I will use the terms “disposition” and “power” interchangeably.
It is worth noting a major distinction within the powers view, concerning how to understand the nature of a power. According to the pure powers view (Bird 2007; Mumford 2004; Mumford and Anjum 2011), the powerful nature of a property is in no way qualitative (or categorical). Yet other powers view proponents advocate for the identity thesis (Heil 2012; Jacobs 2011; Martin 2008), according to which the powerful nature of a property is identical with its qualitative nature, making properties powerful qualities. For the purposes of the discussion to follow, however, this difference among powers view advocates can be safely set aside.
Heil (2012), for instance, warns against taking layers of description to correspond to ontological layers. Granted, those layers of description can all be true (and so one can be a realist about the higher-level entities posited in those true claims), but it does not follow that the truthmakers for those claims are similarly layered. The “linguisticization” of metaphysics, the temptation to read off ontology from the structure of our language, should be resisted.
Williams (2005, fn. 3) acknowledges, even if not to the extent indicated here, that there might be overlap between his three kinds of static dispositions.
Note that this regress problem is importantly different from the sort raised by Lowe (2006, p. 138). There, the concern is with fixing the identity of a disposition. Here, the regress is causal in nature, as one is not trying to explain the identity of a disposition but, rather, trying to explain every instance of internal stability by positing a static disposition.
The controversy concerns not only the ability of an infinite regress of causes to be explanatorily satisfactory, but also the very possibility of an actual infinite in the spatiotemporal world. For a detailed summary of these debates, with extensive citations, see Reichenbach (2013).
Bauer (2012), for example, advocates for this sort of multi-track approach to self-supporting dispositions. His motivation for adopting self-supporting dispositions, however, is not to avoid an infinite regress of supporting dispositions but, rather, to address the “Problem of Being” (i.e., the problem of explaining what a disposition is doing when it is not engaged in its characteristic manifestations.)
See, for instance, Heil (2012), Martin (2008), Mumford and Anjum (2011), and Tugby (2010). It deserves emphasizing here that, as all of these authors remind us, simultaneous does not mean instantaneous. Disposition partners can simultaneously exercise their reciprocal roles in processes that unfold over time, such as in the case of salt dissolving in water.
Again, Bauer appeals to self-supporting dispositions not in order to answer a regress problem but, rather, in order to answer the Problem of Being. While there is not the space here to adequately evaluate Bauer’s motivations for positing self-supporting dispositions, it is clear that the problem of synchronic self-causing that I am about to raise applies to Bauer’s account.
Note that this is not simply an instance of the virtus dormitiva objection, which is often raised against dispositional explanation, and to which a number of replies have been offered (see e.g., Mumford 1998, pp. 136–141; Mumford and Anjum 2011, p. 133). The charge there is that since the phenomena being explained is built into the very characterization of the dispositions, dispositional explanations are entirely vacuous and uninformative: e.g., the pill made one tired because it has the power to make one tired. The problem being raised here goes further. In self-causing dispositions, the problem is that the occurrence of the effect is appealed to in explaining the disposition’s ability to bring about the effect. It is analogous to saying that the pill had the power to make one tired because one was tired—appealing to the fact that you are tired to explain that very fact! This is not the case in the virtus dormitiva objection, since it does not assume that the pill’s power to make one tired is grounded in one’s being tired.
Mumford and Anjum (2011, pp. 118–119) do allow for reciprocal, symmetrical cases of causation, in which a causes b and, simultaneously, b causes a. They would count the case involving the cards on the table as just such a case, with the one card causing the other card to remain upright, and vice versa. However, as far as I understand their account, the symmetry is built from two instances of the (asymmetrical) cause-effect relation. In which case, generating such cases still requires treating a cause and its immediate effect as distinct, if Mumford and Anjum are to avoid making a disposition ontologically prior to itself.
In the literature, “four-dimensionalism” is put to different uses. Some philosophers use it to refer to a theory of time (i.e. eternalism), while others use it to refer to a theory of persistence (i.e. the one according to which an entity’s persistence depends on it having temporal parts). In this paper, I will be adopting the latter use. Within four-dimensionalism, so understood, there is a distinction between stage theory (e.g., Hawley 2001; Sider 1996, 2001) and perdurantism (e.g., Lewis 1971, 1976, 1986; Quine 1950, 1960). Perdurantists take our everyday subject terms, such as “rock,” “boat,” and “person,” to refer to collections of temporal parts. Stage theorists, however, take our talk about ordinary objects to be about singular temporal parts or “stages.” Hence, the difference concerns semantics, with the two views both assuming a four-dimensionalist ontology.
No matter which phrase one uses here to downplay the ontological role of persisting entities, one is not necessarily committed to eliminativism or antirealism regarding such entities. There can still be persisting entities, in that one can make true claims positing them. It will just be that the deep story about persisting entities, the ultimate truthmakers for those claims, are chains of non-persisting entities. To think that the mere acknowledgment of true claims positing persisting entities commits one’s basic ontology to such entities is to fail to heed Heil’s warning against the linguisticization of metaphysics.
The present point is driven by the distinct, temporal parts posited by four-dimensionalism and, therefore, remains neutral between stage theory and perdurantism (which differ semantically).
Note as well that adding causation to the endurantist story invites concerns of self-causation similar to those raised for the synchronic approach to self-supporting dispositions. Granted, the self-supporting disposition would be considered at different times, but it would nonetheless be one and the same entity on endurantism.
To be fair to Williams, he is not necessarily concerned with such fundamental ontology, as suggested by the weak version of dispositional realism with which he operates. For us, though, basic ontology is precisely the context of concern.
This should not be taken to imply that Martin, Heil, and Mumford are in complete agreement about the ontology underlying such cases of external stability. One important difference, for instance, is that Mumford takes each disposition to have its own, private manifestation that it alone works to secure, while Martin and Heil take each disposition to aim at working with a reciprocal disposition so as to secure a mutual manifestation that the disposition partners would equally own. So, on Mumford’s approach, the present cases would be understood as involving powers working in opposite directions towards their own, private manifestations, but with equal force so that they balance out and result in a static manifestation. But on Martin and Heil’s approach, those cases would instead be seen as involving powers intimately working together to support the relevant spatial relations, yielding a static mutual manifestation in which powers cooperate with each other rather than battle. Such ontological differences would also entail different interpretations of Williams’s proposed (and admittedly science-fictional) case involving the two electrons’ static dispositions to maintain their position from one another.
The bundle theorist need not thereby be an eliminativist about objects. One can still truly posit tables, trees, and the like, it will just be that the ultimate truthmakers for those claims do not involve tables or trees or any objects at all but, instead, properties.
Appealing to compresence would not help matters here. If that relation is supported by other properties within the bundle, then we would again get a static manifestation, but one not within a fundamental entity. Alternatively, if the compresence relation is a special, self-supporting property within the bundle, then we would run into the problems raised in Sect. 5 regarding self-supporting dispositions.
One might take compresence to be such a property, insofar as it characterizes the structure of a bundle.
There is the view (e.g., Heil 2012, p. 132; Campbell 1990, pp. 124–125) that a single substance cannot yield the kind of discrete relata required for causal interaction. I address this sort of position in Baltimore (2015), where I argue that a substance’s having distinct dispositions can yield sufficiently discrete relata for causation to occur within that substance.
As indicated in the previous section, Williams’s argument for disposition partners for external stability can resist the threat of an infinite regress. Furthermore, advocates of static dispositions for external stability evidently need not even appeal to a general demand to causally explain external stability, since the cases traditionally cited in support of such dispositions are arguably paradigm instances of causation (e.g., two cards leaning against each other upon a table).
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Acknowledgements
For their helpful feedback on earlier drafts, I would like to thank William Bauer, Adam Podlaskowski, and the anonymous referees who reviewed this paper for Erkenntnis.
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Baltimore, J.A. The Powers View of Properties, Fundamental Ontology, and Williams’s Arguments for Static Dispositions. Erkenn 84, 437–453 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9966-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9966-3