Abstract
Dispositionalists try to provide an account of modality—possibility, necessity, and the counterfactual conditional—in terms of dispositions. But there may be a tension between dispositionalist accounts of possibility on the one hand, and of counterfactuals on the other. Dispositionalists about possibility must hold that there are no impossible dispositions, i.e., dispositions with metaphysically impossible stimulus and/or manifestation conditions; dispositionalist accounts of counterfactuals, if they allow for non-vacuous counterpossibles, require that there are such impossible dispositions. I argue, first, that there are in fact no impossible dispositions; and second, that the dispositionalist can nevertheless acknowledge the non-vacuity of some counterpossibles. The strategy in the second part is one of ‘divide and conquer’ that is not confined to the dispositionalist: it consists in arguing that counterpossibles, when non-vacuous, are read epistemically and are therefore outside the purview of a dispositional account.
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Notes
I take (POSS) to be only a first step towards a dispositionalist account of possibility; my own view is developed in Vetter (2015). The shortcomings of (POSS) that I attempt to overcome there are not relevant to my present concerns, so I will stick with the simplified version here. Note that (POSS) quantifies over the dispositions’ bearers; an alternative approach, exemplified by the Borghini/Williams formulation, would quantify over the dispositions themselves and thus leave room for uninstantiated dispositions to give rise to possibilities as well.
(COUNT) will collapse into (COUNT*) if we make the possession of a disposition with a stimulus consisting in p a condition on the relevance of a system. In order to keep the two claims apart, I will assume that we do not impose such a requirement on relevance.
I have suggested something close to (COUNT) and (COUNT*) in Vetter (2013) and Vetter (2015). Jacobs (2010) provides a better worked-out semantics which does not quantify over the systems that have the relevant dispositions, but rather over ‘property complexes’ that have powers to produce further ‘property complexes’, which appears to me to have elements of two of my suggestions in the text: quantifying over dispositions, not their bearers, and (more implicitly) the idea of mutual manifestation. My arguments in this paper can easily be rephrased to fit his approach: the question I am about to raise, whether anything might have dispositions with impossible stimulus or manifestation conditions, then becomes the question whether any property complex, instantiated or not, includes such dispositions. The restriction to instantiated dispositions that is implicit in my way of phrasing the question makes no difference to the argument.
The conjunction may, but need not, be ordered in terms of priority. Thus Jacobs (2010) defines necessity, and thereby possibility, in terms of the counterfactual, which in turn is understood in terms of dispositions or powers. My point in what follows will concern a much weaker assumption that should be common to dispositionalists: the compatibility of (POSS) (or something like it) with (COUNT), (COUNT*), or something like them.
Note that this is not purely a consequence of the universal quantifier that governs both (COUNT) and (COUNT*). If we thought that there was a single relevant system in any given context and rephrased the truth-conditions accordingly, using a definite description, we would still end up with a kind of systematic falsity, because no system could have the dispositions required for the truth of a counterpossible.
Note, however, that dispositionalism is in an important sense non-reductive: it does not ‘reduce the modal to the non-modal’. But that kind of non-reductionism is of no help here.
In Vetter (2015, ch. 7.2), I do try to explain away all of Jenkins and Nolan’s examples. I there appeal to the idea (which I defend at length earlier in the book) that dispositions are individuated only by their manifestation, not by a stimulus condition. In this paper, I do not want to assume my views on the individuation of dispositions, so I am taking a different angle on Jenkins and Nolan’s argument. Everything that I say here is compatible with the argument in Vetter (2015).
I put this in terms of referential opacity here in order to bring out the parallels with counterfactuals. A more metaphysical way of putting the point would go roughly as follows. Impossible dispositions would have to be individuated hyperintensionally: one and the same object might be disposed in some way towards Hesperus but not towards Phosphorus. (This is premise 1.) But dispositions are not individuated hyperintensionally. (This is premise 2.) So there are no impossible dispositions.
Note that (5) deviates from the Heidi case in that it introduces reference to a concrete object other than the disposition’s possessor itself in the scope of the disposition ascription. (I think that if we spelled out what conjecture X says in the Heidi case, we would find that we are dealing with objects as well, but of course they would be abstract objects.) We need reference to an object, of course, in order for the definition of referential opacity to have any traction at all; I use a concrete object to avoid dispute about the status of abstract objects. I will briefly address—or, at any rate, mention—an objection to object-involving dispositions in Sect. 3.2.
Note that while Williamson uses referential opacity to argue against the claim that counterpossibles are non-vacuous, and in effect against false counterpossibles, I will use it (given premise 2) against the view that there are true ascriptions of impossible dispositions. My strategy is different from Williamson’s although we share a starting point.
For the epistemic reading of indicative conditionals with implicit or explicit ‘must’, see the classic Kratzer (1986).
There may be a dispositionalist semantics for epistemic modals, but it would concern the dispositions of the relevant subject, e.g. the speaker of the sentence, not the dispositions of the objects that the sentence is about. See Vetter (2013).
A result of this instance of dividing may be that modals such as ‘would’ end up being ambiguous between their epistemic and circumstantial uses. I endorse this result, for various reasons; see Viebahn and Vetter (forthcoming).
I continue to ignore deontic modality. As Williamson (ms) notes, it is less easily confused, at least in theory, with circumstantial modality.
Defenders of non-vacuous counterpossibles should agree; Brogaard and Salerno (2007), as I have mentioned earlier, argue that it is precisely the referential opacity of counterpossibles that blocks another argument of Williamson’s against non-vacuous counterpossibles.
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Acknowledgments
For extremely helpful comments and discussion, as well as several very useful examples, I would like to thank Mathias Böhm, Daniel Dohrn, Beau Madison Mount, Christian Nimtz, Daniel Nolan, Moritz Schulz, Lisa Vogt, Lee Walters, and Jonas Werner, as well as the participants of my research colloquium at Humboldt-University in summer 2015.
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Vetter, B. Counterpossibles (not only) for dispositionalists. Philos Stud 173, 2681–2700 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0671-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0671-x