Abstract
A popular version of anti-Humeanism is one that views fundamental properties as being irreducibly dispositional in nature, and it is a view to which I am attracted. Proponents of this view typically object to Humean regularity theories of laws on the basis that they do not explain why our world is regular rather than chaotic from moment to moment. It is thought that, for this reason, Humeanism does not provide firm enough foundations for induction. However, in this paper I argue that it is far from clear how these anti-Humeans can themselves explain this regularity. This is because it is far from clear how they can explain why the entities in our world do not change their dispositional properties arbitrarily over time. This is a neglected problem, which I call the retention problem. In an attempt to solve this problem, several naturalistic explanations of retention are explored. Unfortunately, none of these explanations is free of problems, showing that dispositional forms of anti-Humeanism may not have as many advantages as some have assumed where the problem of induction is concerned.
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Notes
For example, on Lewis’s sophisticated Humean theory of laws (1973, pp. 72–76), a law is an axiom or theorem in the ‘best’ deductive system, one that strikes an optimal balance between simplicity and deductive strength.
Cartwright’s position is complicated by the fact that she claims (rightly in my view) that nature does not display as many regularities as many in the laws debate seem to assume. It is arguable that strict behavioural regularities are displayed only in highly controlled experimental environments, if at all. Nonetheless, it still seems fair to say that nature exhibits enough discernible patterns for scientists to be able to formulate predictions—if only inexact ones—and it is these patterns (whatever they are) that anti-Humeans will want to explain. For convenience, I shall continue to speak of these patterns as regularities (in a loose sense).
It should be noted that this explanatory problem is only likely to apply to the dispositionalist version of anti-Humeanism. For instance, the retention problem may not arise for the anti-Humean views held by philosophers like Carroll (1994) and Maudlin (2007), because they take laws to be primitive and so are not in the business of providing ‘deep’ explanations for law-like regularities. Anti-Humeans like Armstrong (1983), Dretske (1977) and Tooley (1977) do offer a deeper analysis of laws in terms of relations of nomic necessitation between categorical (i.e., non-dispositional) universals. But as a referee as pointed out, the retention problem may not arise for this view as long as there are appropriate laws (i.e. relations of nomic necessitation) which generate the retention facts, such as conservation laws. For reasons given in Sect. 4.8, it is less clear that the dispositionalists can straightforwardly appeal to conservation laws in this way.
One could provide a non-naturalistic explanation for property retention by maintaining that God sustains the universe at every moment. This would, however, leave us with a divine governance view of laws, which would mark a significant shift away from the dispositionalist naturalistic project.
This again relates to Cartwright’s (1999) point that strict regularities are rarely, if ever, exhibited in uncontrolled environments.
Another way of conceiving of this ‘disposition swapping’ scenario would be to say that the body has an arbitrary ‘gruesome’ dispositional property. So, in the case above we could describe the body as having the complex dispositional property to attract other masses before an arbitrary time t and to repel masses after t, and so on. The result would be the same, which is that it would be very difficult to predict behaviour in such cases. An anonymous referee has informed me that the possibility of complex dispositions like these has been raised previously by Barry Loewer and Tim Maudlin.
Note that this principle does not imply determinism. This is because dispositionalists are able to provide reasons for chancy occurrences in terms of the manifestations of the objective propensities of things. It is therefore important not to confuse chancy occurrences with arbitrary occurrences, which are inexplicable.
Pruss’s Causal Principle says that every contingent event has a cause (2007, p. 292).
The possibility of space invaders is also used in support of Beebee’s arguments (2011) against Ellis’s natural kind essentialism. Below we will consider ways in which an essentialist like Ellis might try to resist the possibility of arbitrary replacement.
This is not to say that anti-annihilation properties could not perform the sorts of explanatory roles that essences like ‘atomic number 79’ play. One justification for elevating the latter’s status to that of an essential property is that it plays important explanatory roles, such as explaining the other ‘manifest properties and behaviour of the substances in question’ (Ellis 2005, p. 467). But as a referee has pointed out, it may be that anti-annihilation essences could help to explain the other manifest properties of an entity. For example, there is a sense in which water’s ability to dissolve salt rests in part on the fact that water generally does not arbitrarily disappear when in contact with salt. And one reason for this general fact could be that water has an anti-annihilation property.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this suggestion. Note that this general strategy is the one used by Bigelow et al. when considering the question of why events is our world obey conservations laws (1992, p. 384). We will return to this issue later on when we discuss the world-level retention strategy in Sect. 4.7.
In private communication, Nancy Cartwright identified a proposal along these lines.
In some ways, Unger’s notion of a comprehensively propensitied propensity resembles Bauer’s conception of a pure disposition. In response to the problem of how dispositions can continue to exist when they are not displaying their characteristic manifestations, Bauer (2012, p. 156) argues that they ground their own existence by manifesting their own ‘minimally sufficient’ occurrence. On Bauer’s theory, then, there is a sense in which dispositions are self-retaining.
An anonymous referee has suggested that the Schrödinger equation is another example of a global law which does not allow room for the spontaneous annihilation or creation of matter. If this is right, then what the current proposal would say is that the Schrödinger equation is metaphysically grounded by a conjunction of world-level dispositions: a dynamic, probabilistic disposition for motion together with a universal retention disposition.
Note that the mere acceptance of conservation laws in science does not automatically solve the dispositionalists’ retention problem because such laws can easily be accommodated by Humeans, who will just treat them as expressing brute, contingent regularities. Therefore, in order to solve the retention problem, something like the world-essence view is needed, so that these laws may be viewed as non-contingent.
I note also that Livanios’s alternative account of conservation laws is of no help to the dispositionalists. On Livanios’s account (2010), properties are categorical rather than dispositional, and symmetry principles (which entail conservation) are primitive properties of the world or its structure. See also French (2014, Chap. 9).
For further details of the accelerating universe hypothesis, see e.g. Riess (1998).
Here I am again indebted to an anonymous referee.
I am grateful to John Heil, who made this last point in private communication.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the three anonymous referees and Helen Beebee, who provided many invaluable comments and also audiences in Cologne, Durham and Nottingham, where earlier versions of this paper were presented. I am grateful too for discussions I had at Oxford University with Nancy Cartwright, John Heil, Anna Marmodoro and John Pemberton on some of the issues covered in this paper. Finally, I would like to thank the Mind Association for awarding me the 2015–2016 Mind Fellowship, during which the final version of the manuscript was completed.
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Tugby, M. The problem of retention. Synthese 194, 2053–2075 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1036-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1036-x