Abstract
This paper discusses Lee’s argument that Lewis’s reformed conditional analysis of dispositions is preferable to the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. Lee’s argument is basically that there are some examples that can be adequately handled by Lewis’s analysis but cannot by the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. But I will reveal that, when carefully understood, they spell no trouble for the simple conditional analysis of dispositions, failing to serve a motivating role for Lewis’s analysis.
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Notes
It might be suggested that in a usual context where we entertain the counterfactual conditional that if I were not to take the tablet I would not die, we envisage my taking no tablet at all, in which case I wouldn’t die; but in a usual context where we entertain the counterfactual conditional that salt would dissolve if thrown into water after being hexed, we envisage the salt’s being thrown into water without being hexed, in which case it would still dissolve. Does this suggestion help Lee accommodate our inclination to endorse a causal dependence between my ingesting the tablet and my death whilst maintaining that there is no causal dependence between salt’s being thrown into water after being hexed and salt’s dissolving? No. First, the suggestion itself is not incontrovertible at all. What is worse, even if correct, it would be doubtful that the notion of usual context provides a metaphysical underpinning for causal dependence between two events, given its context-sensitive and interest-relative nature. This suggestion was brought to my attention by an anonymous referee.
This is a slight variant of the example discussed by Lee himself.
The most worrying feature of Gundersen’s counterexamples is that the underlying mechanism of them puts our entire disposition talk in jeopardy in a way that does not exist in Lee’s examples. This, I acknowledge, is in need of further articulation, which should be shelved for another time, unfortunately.
In describing his second example, Lee implicitly restricts his attention to deterministic cases. For the sake of discussion, I will follow suit.
Lee’s SCA-CON (cold-cure) indeed gives the nonsensical verdict that orange juice can cure cold. But this merely means that the specification of the cold-cure manifestation incorporated into it is unacceptable.
For a definition of dispositional mimicker, see (Choi 2005a).
Here one might insist that a placebo-effect, by definition, means an effect that comes to pass via an indirect or non-standard process; and hence that to the extent that my characterization of direct and standard process suggests otherwise, it is in trouble. But I disagree. Perhaps there is a medically important sense in which the placebo effect involved in the operation of snake oil differs from the process through which most arthritis medicines take effect. In a metaphysically sense, however, we cannot rule out the possibility that the placebo effect works through a direct and standard process for the disposition to cure arthritis. This is in resemblance with Lewis (1997, 154)’s example of HIV where a HIV kills its victim by debilitating his immune system, a process that is different from the process most lethal viruses kill their victims. There is no question, however, that HIV is lethal, which means that the HIV kills the victim through a certain direct and standard process for lethality (Choi 2008, 826). I thus see nothing wrong with a doctor in the imagined society who prescribes snake oil for his arthritis patient and says ‘It can cure your arthritis although it takes effect via your belief that snake oil cures arthritis.’
For my reason for denying the conceptual possibility of intrinsic finks or antidotes, see (Choi 2005b, forthcoming).
Lee hints that, according to RCA-CON, snake oil cannot cure arthritis patients in the imagined society because its causal requirement is not satisfied. I think this is a mistake although I will not discuss it in detail.
As we have seen earlier, Lee introduces the assumption that it takes about 2 seconds for us to make Chilly situated at room temperature and to strike it with ordinary methods and insinuates implicitly that this assumption is at work in his reasoning leading to the conclusion that Chilly does not come out fragile by SCA-CON. On Lewis’s semantics for counterfactual conditionals, however, it has no place in deciding whether or not Chilly comes out fragile by SCA-CON. For, the antecedent is made true by a miracle, albeit a minor miracle; and therefore, it is not relevant how long it takes us to realize the antecedent with ordinary methods. What is a deciding factor as to the truth value of the counterfactual conditional at issue is how long Chilly retains the microstructure M when it is situated at a room temperature, about which, strangely enough, Lee introduces no assumption. This is why his discussion is in need of clarification.
A similar idea can be found in (Choi 2005b, 500).
References
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Acknowledgement
This work was done under Global Research Network Program (collaborators: Huw Price, Alexander Bird, and Toby Handfield), which was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (KRF-2008-220-A00001).
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Choi, S. Dispositions and Bogus Counterexamples: Reply to Lee. Philosophia 38, 579–588 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9248-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9248-7