Abstract
Nelson Goodman has written that
Besides the observable properties it exhibits and the actual processes it undergoes, a thing is full of threats and promises. The dispositions or capacities of a thing — its flexibility, its inflammability, its solubility — are no less important to us than its overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. And so we are moved to inquire whether we can bring them down to earth; whether, that is, we can explain disposition terms without any reference to occult powers.1
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Notes
N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Indiana, 1965) p. 40.
R. Carnap, ‘Testability and Meaning’, Classics of Analytic Philosophy, ed. R.R. Ammerman (New York, 1965) p. 145, and
‘Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, I, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven (Minneapolis, 1956) p. 63
C. G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explantation (New York, 1965) p. 109
A. Pap, ‘Are physical magnitudes operationally definable?’, Measurement: Definitions and Theories, ed. C.W. Churchman, P. Tatoosh (New York, 1959) p. 178.
G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949) pp. 43, 123 (my italics).
See Carnap’s ‘Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science’, Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. H. Feigl, W. Sellars (New York, 1949) p. 416;
Hempel’s ‘Methods of concept formation in science’, Foundations of the Unity of Science, II, ed. O Neurath, R. Carnap, C. Morris (Chicago and London, 1970) pp. 676–7
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (London, 1963) p. 280, and
‘Dispositional concepts and extensional logic’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, II, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven, G. Maxwell (Minneapolis, 1958) p. 198.
See also R. B. Braithwaite, ‘The nature of believing’, Knowledge and Belief, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (London, 1967) p. 35
J.L. Mackie, Truth Probability and Paradox (London, 1973) pp. 123–7
and H. H. Price, Belief (London, 1969) pp. 246–7.
W. S. Sellars, Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, Illinois, 1969) p. 119.
N. Rescher, ‘On the logic of chronological propositions’, Mind, LXXV (1966).
D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London, 1968) p.86.
J. F. Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford, 1971) p. 105.
W. P. Alston, ‘Dispositons and Occurences’, Canadian Journal of Philosphy, I (1971) p. 143.
See also C. D. Broad, An Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, I (Cambridge, 1933) p. 271
H. H. Price, Thinking and Experience, 2nd. ed. (London, 1969) p. 322.
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Woolhouse, R.S. (1976). The Empiricist Account of Dispositions. In: Vesey, G. (eds) Impressions of Empiricism. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02804-7_12
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