Dispositions and the Argument from Science
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (1):71-90 (2011)
| Abstract | Central to the debate between Humean and anti-Humean metaphysics is the question of whether dispositions can exist in the absence of categorical properties that ground them (that is, where the causal burden is shifted on to categorical properties on which the dispositions would therefore supervene). Dispositional essentialists claim that they can; categoricalists reject the possibility of such ?baseless? dispositions, requiring that all dispositions must ultimately have categorical bases. One popular argument, recently dubbed the ?Argument from Science?, has appeared in one or another form over much of the last century and purports to win the day for the dispositional essentialist. Taking its cue from physical theory, the Argument from Science treats the exclusively dispositional characterizations of the fundamental particles one finds in physical theory as providing a key premise in what has been called a ?decisive? argument for baseless dispositions. Despite sharing the intuition that dispositions can be baseless, I argue that the force and significance of the Argument from Science have been greatly overestimated: no version of the argument is close to decisive, and only one version succeeds in scoring points against the categoricalist. Not only is physical theory more ontologically innocent than defenders of baseless dispositions seem to appreciate, most versions of the Argument from Science neglect important ways that dispositions could be grounded by categorical properties | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,705 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesTomasz Bigaj (2012). Ungrounded Dispositions in Quantum Mechanics. Foundations of Science 17 (3):205-221.
Andreas Hüttemann (2009). Dispositions in Physics. In Gregor Damschen, Robert Schnepf & Karsten Stueber (eds.), Debating Dispositions. De Gruyter.
David Yates (forthcoming). The Essence of Dispositional Essentialism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Neil Edward Williams (2009). The Ungrounded Argument is Unfounded: A Response to Mumford. Synthese 170 (1):7 - 19.
Toby Handfield (2008). Unfinkable Dispositions. Synthese 160 (2):297 - 308.
Toby Handfield (2009). The Metaphysics of Dispositions and Causes. In Toby Handfield (ed.), Dispositions and Causes. Clarendon Press.
Edward Wilson Averill (1990). Are Physical Properties Dispositions? Philosophy of Science 57 (1):118-132.
William A. Bauer (2010). The Ontology of Pure Dispositions. Dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Andreas Hüttemann (2007). Causation, Laws and Dispositions. In Max Kistler & Bruno Gnassounou (eds.), Dispositions and Causal Powers. Ashgate.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-01-02Total downloads53 ( #19,406 of 549,224 )Recent downloads (6 months)8 ( #8,956 of 549,224 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
