Abstract
It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called “masked dispositions” and “finkish dispositions”). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to Φ when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would Φ ceteris paribus. I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised in the literature.
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Notes
See Maurreau (1997).
Fodor (1991) offers other examples of ceteris paribus or “hedged” laws—“The moon looks larger on the horizon than it does overhead” and “English speakers can hear ‘They are flying planes’ as ambiguous.” He says that an obvious feature of such laws is that they are subject to exception. Somewhere there is a person for whom the moon illusion does not work, and there are some people that may not detect the ambiguity in the sentence.
In a similar vein, Cartwright (1983) and Pietroski and Rey (1995) have defended the view that such ceteris paribus (or “normal conditions”) clauses do not make for useless and vacuous analyses. It is also worth noting that Fodor (1983, 1987, 1991) has argued that ceteris paribus conditions are necessary if we are to make sense of psychological laws and laws in cognitive science. Lange (2002) too offers arguments along these lines.
Wallis (1994) makes a similar point.
See Dretske (1981) for a discussion of examples of context-sensitivity.
Fara (2005) offers some reasons for thinking that a context sensitive semantics for disposition ascriptions will not do. I think his arguments fail. It is worth nothing that disposition ascriptions seem to satisfy a number of the “hallmarks” of context sensitivity mentioned in Dretsky (1981). In addition, other authors have argued for the need to treat dispositions ascriptions as being context sensitive (see, for example, Manley and Wasserman (2007).
Although it might be possible for an infinite being to exhaustively spell out the list—that is, it might be possible in principle.
As I have already suggested, it seems that the attempt to fully spell out a ceteris paribus clause—or stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for a ceteris paribus clause—is, for mere mortals at least, hopelessly ambitious.
Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for stressing this point and for offering the example involving flammable substances below.
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Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Tony Brueckner, Eric Schwitzgebel, and John Fischer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also enormously indebted to Alan Steinberg for enduring countless conversations about the nature of dispositions.
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Steinberg, J.R. Dispositions and subjunctives. Philos Stud 148, 323–341 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9325-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9325-y