Abstract
Stephen Mumford has argued that dispositionalists ought to be endurantists because perdurantism, by breaking down persisting objects in sequences of static discrete existents, is at odds with a powers metaphysics. This has been contested by Neil Williams who offers his own version of ‘powerful’ perdurance where powers function as links between the temporal parts of persisting objects. Weighing up the arguments given by both sides, I show that the profile of ‘powerful’ persistence crucially depends on how one conceptualises the processes involved in the manifestation of powers. As this turns out not to be determined per se by subscribing to some view labelled ‘powers view’, further discussion is needed as to what processes are and to what kind of process theory a powers metaphysics should commit itself in order to be convincing. I defend the claim that dispositionalism is best combined with a version of process ontology that is indeed incompatible with a perdurantist analysis of persistence. However, I argue that this does not imply that dispositionalists ought to be endurantists.
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Notes
- 1.
I regard stage theory (exdurantism) as a version of perdurantism and adverbialism as a version of endurantism.
- 2.
Meanwhile also Dumsday (2019) has offered arguments in favour of reconciling perdurantism with dispositionalism, published after the completion of the present book chapter. Dumsday does not in detail discuss Williams’s proposal.
- 3.
Even if granting it for the sake of argument, dispositionalism could still turn out to be incompatible with endurantism. Maybe dispositionalism does not deliver any coherent and convincing account of persistence at all?
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Macroscopic powers exist only linguistically. Raising the question, “what should […] we say about the typical powers we ascribe to mid-sized objects that result in much longer processes?”, Williams explains: “the answer is that these powers will not be real powers at all. They will be powers in name only: rough-and-ready accounts of how things tend to occur in the world” (Williams 2014, p. 366; emphasis in the original; see also Williams 2019, ch. 6.4, p. 143). Only “atomic (fundamental) states of affairs are property bearers” and, hence, bearers of powers (Williams 2019, ch. 10.2, p. 229). However, Williams further argues that complex states of affairs, while not having properties, are still “able to satisfy predicates” (Williams 2019, ch. 10.2, p. 226) and thus can truthfully be ascribed ‘dispositions’ which, as “causally inefficacious predications” (Williams 2019, ch. 10.2, p. 232), are sharply to be distinguished from ‘powers’.
- 8.
“It follows that some true power ascriptions – stated ceteris paribus – capture the nature of certain objects, and are handy in science and generally useful for navigating the world around us, but do not pick out the powers that do the work. This is not to deny that dried out hunks of clay are brittle, but what makes it true that such a hunk is brittle is not its possessing a power of brittleness, but that it has some constellation of powers that (if allowed to produce their manifestations through sufficiently many iterations without being disturbed) would give rise to a series of constellations and manifestations on which a process like crumbling would supervene” (Williams, Chap. 6, this volume, p. 80; emphases in the original; see also Williams 2019, ch. 6.3, p. 134).
- 9.
- 10.
Simultaneity seems generally to hold for the class of powers which Aristotle called rational abilities. However, it does not seem to be true for these powers that they, as Mumford and Anjum’s model of causation also requires, ‘merge into and become’ their effects, at least not literally as in the case of the ‘sweet solution’. I’m not turning into a piano while playing the piano!
- 11.
It is hard to see how any microscopist analysis of my playing, say, the Moonlight sonata on the piano could ever appear to be convincing. Consider my brother Ben who is able to press individually any key I am pressing while playing the Moonlight sonata. Clearly, he thereby does not possess the ability to play the Moonlight sonata. Being able to press keys individually is not the same as being able to play the piano! As Mumford puts it: “you can play the piano only by being able to manifest a process as a whole, and the power has to be for that process” (personal conversation, September 2018).
- 12.
Mumford and Anjum aim to capture effects like these (e.g., two books leaning against each other) by modelling dispositional causes as vectors, see Mumford and Anjum (2011), ch. 2. For a critique of this model, see Pechlivanidi and Psillos (Chap. 9, this volume).
- 13.
Change “must involve bringing about a state of affairs that is clearly different from that which obtained prior to the manifestation of the disposition” (Williams 2005, p. 304).
- 14.
Williams claims that we tend to overlook these static powers because our survival more strongly depends on knowing dynamic powers, and science is primarily interested in explaining change (Williams 2005, p. 307 f.).
- 15.
Williams (2005) distinguishes between three kinds of static powers: static powers for internal stability (which are powers for persistence), static powers for external stability and static powers involving threshold conditions.
- 16.
“The second model of processes, the ‘adamantine’ model, sees them as continuous and impenetrable. To split them up is impossible, as the process would thereby cease to be a member of the same process-type, or cease to be natural in the right sort of way, or fail to be properly understandable” (Williams 2017, p. 157).
- 17.
Williams rejects this assumption, insisting that the (micro-) powers at the fundamental level manifest with necessity whereas interruptibility is a higher-level phenomenon exhibited only by domino-like processes: “Manifestations arise as a matter of metaphysical necessity , but the processes that supervene on sequences of manifestations do not” (Williams 2014, p. 366).
- 18.
The concept of a temporally extended ‘adamantine’ and, that is, of a non-interruptible temporally extended process looks indeed like a strawman to me. Who would ever endorse such a concept? The only philosopher I know of who endorses an adamantine concept of process at all is Williams himself with regard to the fundamental level of the manifestations of microscopic powers.
- 19.
Compare also Williams’s example of the Turing machine in Williams (Chap. 6, this volume, p. 75).
- 20.
Anjum and Mumford (2018a, p. 72 f.) accordingly defend the claim that time is dense rather than discrete.
- 21.
“I think that there’s a temporal part, and then there’s another. The ‘causal magic’ (the acting of the powers of the first in producing the second) are best thought of as acting between. Of course, that’s misleading. There’s no time involved. There’s really just one stage and then the next. But the arrows show that that’s where the causal action is, so to speak. If some mighty being ended the world at TP1, TP1 wouldn’t bring anything about” (N. Williams, personal conversation, July 2013).
- 22.
The qualification “in Williams’s sense” is crucial here since to characterise a forest as a “collection of trees” is, of course, to completely misunderstand what a forest is. As we can learn from forest ecologists, forests are complex ecosystems consisting of numerous mutually dependent species of organisms, including trees. Trees, rather than being static, distinct things, rely on one another as well as on other species for their survival by way of continuous interaction, something Whitehead (1925, p. 206) acknowledged when calling the forest “the triumph of the organisation of mutually dependent species”. Ontologically, thus, forests are much better understood as dynamic networks of interdependent processes, and in this sense, the process ontologist maintains, they may indeed serve as a model of persisting entities.
- 23.
“[T]he mere change in status of a disposition from non-manifested to manifested will not count as an appropriate change in this sense […] as no property is actually lost or gained by the object in this situation” (Williams 2005, p. 321).
- 24.
See also Mumford and Anjum (2011), p. 121: “Causation comes in temporally extended wholes rather than as constructions from changeless discreta”.
- 25.
See, e.g., Bergson (2010), ch. 6, p. 212 f.: “One recognizes the real, the actual, the concrete, by the fact that it is variability itself. One recognizes the element by the fact that it is invariable. And it is invariable by definition, being a schema, a simplified reconstruction, often a mere symbol, in any case, a view taken of the reality that flows. But the mistake is to believe that with these schemas one could recompose the real.”
- 26.
Similarly, Anjum and Mumford explain that the standard model of causation starts from “a discontinuous view of nature, because change is analysed as a mere succession of discrete, self-contained objects, parts, or stages. The perdurantist begins with a metaphysics of static, temporal parts and then tries to explain change through the way in which those parts are arranged. The alternative view is to accept change as basic – something to be found in every segment of a process, no matter how small – and then explain stability […] as an equilibrium created by counterbalancing powers” (Anjum and Mumford 2018a, p. 71).
- 27.
“[I]n order for the object as a whole to persist, the object stages themselves must have powers to reinvent themselves from one moment to the next. The object is involved in a perpetual state of reproduction: each object stage creating the next, moment after moment” (Williams 2019, ch. 9.4, p. 214).
- 28.
Williams may want to reply that he doesn’t care so much about biology because biology is reducible to physics, and for physics, his picture of persistence is the most plausible one. However, apart from it being doubtful if biology is indeed reducible to physics, it is not clear that physics supports a thing ontological view of reality. According to Bergson, the opposite is the case: “The more [physical science] progresses the more it resolves matter into actions moving through space, into movements dashing back and forth in a constant vibration so that mobility becomes reality itself” (Bergson 2010, ch. 5, p. 175; see also Bergson 2004, ch. 4, pp. 263ff.). Similarly, Rescher (1996, p. 97 f.) argues that “the rise of quantum theory put money in the process philosopher’s bank account” insofar as “matter in the small” turns out to be “a collection of fluctuating processes organized into stable structures […] by statistical regularities”. In striking parallel with Bergson’s interpretation of matter as a continuum of rhythmic vibrations, some physicists have recently started promoting what they call “eurhythmic physics” which analyses physical entities as maximally stabilised systems of interactions (Croca 2016). I am grateful to Leo Caves for pointing me towards Croca’s work.
- 29.
For a more detailed discussion of the distinction between substance ontology and Humean ontology as two types of thing ontology, see Meincke 2018b, 2019b, c, forthcoming.
- 30.
- 31.
This accords with Heil’s thesis that powers are part of an overall ontological ‘package deal’, see Heil (Chap. 2, this volume). However, Heil and I disagree on what this overall ontology should be: Heil endorses (a version of) substance ontology; I favour process ontology.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter brings together research I conducted at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, under the auspices of the research project “Powers and the Identity of Agents” (PI: E. Runggaldier), funded by Austrian Science Fund, and at the University of Exeter, UK, under the auspices of the research project “A Process Ontology for Biology” (PI: J. Dupré), funded by the European Research Council. I completed the final version of the chapter while working on the research project “Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy” (PI: E. Kingma) at the University of Southampton, UK, also funded by the European Research Council. Many thanks to all institutions and funders. The chapter has benefitted from three public presentations, given on 1st August 2013 in Innsbruck, Austria, at the conference “The Ontological Commitments of Dispositionalism”, organised by me and D. Wehinger as part of the project “Powers and the Identity of Agents”; on 20th May 2015 in Exeter, UK, as part of the public lecture series at the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences (Egenis) of the University of Exeter; and on 21st September 2018 in Cologne, Germany, at the workshop “Change and Change-Makers. New Perspectives on the Problem of Persistence”, organised by the Society for Philosophy of Time (S.P.O.T.) in association with the 10th Congress of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP). I am grateful to the audiences in Innsbruck, Exeter and Cologne for inspiring discussions. Last but not least, I am indebted to Neil E. Williams for his efforts to help me understand his view, to Stephen Mumford for very useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and to an anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback.
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Meincke, A.S. (2020). Powers, Persistence and Process. In: Meincke, A.S. (eds) Dispositionalism. Synthese Library, vol 417. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28722-1_7
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