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Dispositional Pluralism
Jennifer McKitrick offers an opinionated guide to the philosophy of dispositions. In her view, when an object has a disposition, it is such that, if a certain type of circumstance were to occur, a certain kind of event would occur. Since it is very common for this to be the case for a variety of reasons, dispositions are very abundant and diverse. They include such varied properties as character traits like a hero's courage, characteristics of physical objects like a wine glass's fragility, and characteristics of microphysical entities like an electron's charge. Some dispositions are natural while others are non-natural. Some dispositions called powers are ungrounded while non-fundamental di...
Dispositions
'Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their distinctive accounts cover many of the issues surrounding dispositions such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation. Dispositions illuminates this central topic in analytic philosophy and at the same time highlights deeper concerns of metaphysics.
Dispositions
Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. Dispositions: A Debate is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation.
Dispositions and Causal Powers
Dispositions are everywhere. We say that a wall is hard, that water quenches thirst and is transparent, that dogs can swim and oak trees can let their leaves fall, and that acid has the power to corrode metals. All these statements express attributions of dispositions, be they physical, physiological or psychological, yet there is much philosophical debate about how far, if at all, dispositional predicates can have complete meaning or figure in causal explanations. This collection of essays, by leading international researchers, examine the case for realism with respect to dispositions and causal powers in both metaphysics and science. Among the issues debated in this book is whether dispositions can be analyzed in terms of conditionals, whether all dispositions have a so-called categorical basis and, if they do, what is the relation between the disposition and its basis.
Debating Dispositions
Ordinary language and scientific discourse are filled with linguistic expressions for dispositional properties such as "soluble," "elastic," "reliable," and "humorous." We characterize objects in all domains - physical objects as well as human persons - with the help of dispositional expressions. Hence, the concept of a disposition has historically and systematically played a central role in different areas of philosophy ranging from metaphysics to ethics. The contributions of this volume analyze the ancient foundations of the discussion about disposition, examine the problem of disposition within the context of the foundation of modern science, and analyze this dispute up to the 20th century. Furthermore, articles explore the contemporary theories of dispositions.
Dispositions
Mumford puts forward a new theory of dispositions, showing how central their role in metaphysics and philosophy of science is. Much of our understanding of the physical and psychological world is expressed in terms of dispositional properties--from the spin of a sub-atomic particle to the solubility of sugar. Mumford discusses what it means to say that something has a property of this kind and how dispositions can possibly be real things in the world.
A Wittgensteinian Perspective on Dispositions
This book investigates dispositions in grammatical-normative terms through a contrast between a naturalized paradigm and a Wittgenstein-inspired perspective. The book presents a conceptual analysis of the notion of disposition informed by Wittgenstein's and Ryle's philosophies to defend a normative notion of disposition. The book opens with a presentation of the current naturalized paradigm on dispositions, focusing on its main presuppositions and limits. It then turns to the discussion of a Wittgensteinian-inspired dispositionalism of knowing and understanding, before filling the exegetical gap about Wittgenstein's own use of the notion of disposition. The author critically engages with the current paradigm using Ryle's notion of category mistake, before concluding with a presentation of some philosophical views where a notion of normative disposition is employed. This book is essential reading for anyone searching for a new perspective on dispositions and will broaden the appeal of the Wittgensteinian tradition within contemporary analytic philosophy and, potentially, psychology as well.
Potentiality
Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be...
Natural Laws as Dispositions
The book provides a novel account of laws of nature via dispositions. Laws of nature play a paramount role in philosophy, science and everyday life. Understanding laws of nature is philosophically interesting on its own right but also many important notions belonging to philosophy of science, like causation, prediction and explanation, are intimately related to the laws of nature. The book outlines the alleged characteristics of the laws of nature and introduces the main families of theories of laws of nature – neo-humean, ADT and dispositional theories. It then develops an account of dispositions the `triadic process picture of dispositions’ (TPD) and applies it to the debate about laws of nature. Finally, the (TPD) account of the necessity of the laws of nature is presented: laws of nature are naturally necessary and metaphysically contingent. Thus the book provides an introduction to the debates about laws of nature as well as dispositions, while at the same time developing a novel theory and thus is interesting for the beginner as well as expert in these fields.
What Tends to Be
People tend to enjoy listening to music or watching television, sleeping at night and celebrating birthdays. Plants tend to grow and thrive in sunlight and mild temperatures. We also know that tendencies are not perfectly regular and that there are patterns in the natural world, which are reliable to a degree, but not absolute. What should we make of a world where things tend to be one way but could be another? Is there a position between necessity and possibility? If there is, what are the implications for science, knowledge and ethics? This book explores these questions and is the first full-length treatment of the philosophy of tendencies. Anjum and Mumford argue that although the philoso...
