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  1. Process Theory and the Concept of Substance.Ian J. Thompson - manuscript
    Since the failure of both pure corpuscular and pure wave philosophies of nature, process theories assume that only events need to exist in order to have a physics. Starting from an ontology of actual events, a dispositional analysis is shown here to lead to a new idea of substance, that of a `distribution of potentiality or propensity'. This begins to provide a useful foundation for quantum physics. A model is presented to show how the existence of physical substances could be (...)
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  2. Evolvability as a Disposition: Philosophical Distinctions, Scientific Implications.Ingo Brigandt, Cristina Villegas, Alan C. Love & Laura Nuño de la Rosa - 2023 - In Thomas F. Hansen, David Houle, Mihaela Pavličev & Christophe Pélabon (eds.), Evolvability: A Unifying Concept in Evolutionary Biology? MIT Press. pp. 55–72.
    A disposition or dispositional property is a capacity, ability, or potential to display or exhibit some outcome. Evolvability refers to a disposition to evolve. This chapter discusses why the dispositional nature of evolvability matters—why philosophical distinctions about dispositions can have scientific implications. To that end, we build a conceptual toolkit with vocabulary from prior philosophical analyses using a different disposition: protein foldability. We then apply this toolkit to address several methodological questions related to evolvability. What entities are the bearers of (...)
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  3. Disentangling Dispositions from Powers.Andrei A. Buckareff - 2022 - Dialogue 61 (1):107-121.
    Many powers-realists assume that the powers of objects are identical with the dispositions of objects and, hence, that ‘power’ and ‘disposition’ are interchangeable. In this article, I aim to disentangle dispositions from powers with the goal of getting a better sense of how powers and dispositions relate to one another. I present and defend a modest realism about dispositions built upon a standard strong realism about powers. I argue that each correct disposition-ascription we can make of an object is made (...)
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  4. Dispositional Pluralism. [REVIEW]Vassilis Livanios - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (281):881-883.
    Dispositional Pluralism. By McKitrick Jennifer.
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  5. Explanatory dispositionalism: What anti-humeans should say.Barbara Vetter - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2051-2075.
    Inspired both by our ordinary understanding of the world and by reflection on science, anti-Humeanism is a growing trend in metaphysics. Anti-Humeans reject the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience that the world is “just one little thing and then another”, and argue instead that dispositions, powers, or capacities provide connection and activity in nature. But how exactly are we to understand the shared commitment of this anti-Humean movement? I argue that this kind of anti-Humeanism, at its most general level, is (...)
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  6. Emotions as Original Existences: A Theory of Emotion, Motivation and the Self.Demian Whiting - 2020 - Palgrave Macmillan.
    This book defends the much-disputed view that emotions are what Hume referred to as ‘original existences’: feeling states that have no intentional or representational properties of their own. In doing so, the book serves as a valuable counterbalance to the now mainstream view that emotions are representational mental states. Beginning with a defence of a feeling theory of emotion, Whiting opens up a whole new way of thinking about the role and centrality of emotion in our lives, showing how emotion (...)
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  7. Quine's Monism and Modal Eliminativism in the Realm of Supervenience.Atilla Akalın - 2019 - International Journal of Social Humanities Sciences Research (JSHRS) 6 (34):795-800.
    This study asserts that W.V.O. Quine’s eliminative philosophical gaze into mereological composition affects inevitably his interpretations of composition theories of ontology. To investigate Quine’s property monism from the account of modal eliminativism, I applied to his solution for the paradoxes of de re modalities’ . Because of its vital role to figure out how dispositions are encountered by Quine, it was significantly noted that the realm of de re modalities doesn’t include contingent and impossible inferences about things. Therefore, for him, (...)
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  8. The Correlation Argument for Reductionism.Christopher Clarke - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (1):76-97.
    Reductionists say things like: all mental properties are physical properties; all normative properties are natural properties. I argue that the only way to resist reductionism is to deny that causation is difference making (thus making the epistemology of causation a mystery) or to deny that properties are individuated by their causal powers (thus making properties a mystery). That is to say, unless one is happy to deny supervenience, or to trivialize the debate over reductionism. To show this, I argue that (...)
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  9. Emotion as the categorical basis for moral thought.Demian Whiting - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (4):533-553.
    I offer and develop an original answer to the question of whether emotion plays an important role in the formation of moral thought. In a nutshell, my answer will be that if motivational internalism provides us with a correct description of the nature of moral thought, then emotion plays an important role because emotion is required to explain or ground the behavioral dispositions that are involved in moral thought.
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  10. Reasons, Dispositions, and Value.Aaron P. Elliott - 2017 - Philosophers' Imprint 17.
    In this paper, I will discuss an objection to Buck-Passing accounts of value, such as Reasons Fundamentalism. Buck-Passing views take value to be derivative of or reducible to reasons. The objection is that since there can be value in possible worlds in which there are no reasons, value must not be ontologically derivative of reasons. Thus, BP is false. In this paper, I show that by accepting a dispositionalist revision, BP can allow such worlds while maintaining that reasons are interestingly (...)
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  11. Biomarkers in the Ontology for General Medical Science.Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith - 2015 - In Ronald Cornet (ed.), Digital Healthcare Empowering Europeans. IOS Press. pp. 155-159.
    Based on the Ontology for General Medical Science, we propose definitions for biomarkers of various types of. These definitions provide not only a complete formal representation of what biomarkers are according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), but also remove the ambiguities and inconsistencies encountered in the documentation provided by the IOM.
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  12. Grounding and Necessity.Stephan Leuenberger - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (2):151-174.
    The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie counterexamples. First, some (...)
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  13. Do Extrinsic Dispositions Need Extrinsic Causal Bases?Gabriele Contessa - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3):622-638.
    In this paper, I distinguish two often-conflated theses—the thesis that all dispositions are intrinsic properties and the thesis that the causal bases of all dispositions are intrinsic properties—and argue that the falsity of the former does not entail the falsity of the latter. In particular, I argue that extrinsic dispositions are a counterexample to first thesis but not necessarily to the second thesis, because an extrinsic disposition does not need to include any extrinsic property in its causal basis. I conclude (...)
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  14. Dispositionality: Beyond The Biconditionals.David Manley - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2):321 - 334.
    Suppose dispositions bear a distinctive connection to counterfactual facts, perhaps one that could be enshrined in a variation on the well-worn schema "Necessarily, x is disposed to phi in psi iff x would phi in psi. Could we exploit this connection to provide an account of what it is to be a disposition? This paper is about four views of dispositionality that attempt to do so.
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  15. Dispositions, manifestations, and causal structure.Toby Handfield - 2010 - In Anna Marmodoro (ed.), The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Their Manifestations. Routledge.
    This paper examines the idea that there might be natural kinds of causal processes, with characteristic diachronic structure, in much the same way that various chemical elements form natural kinds, with characteristic synchronic structure. This claim -- if compatible with empirical science -- has the potential to shed light on a metaphysics of essentially dispositional properties, championed by writers such as Bird and Ellis.
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  16. Dispositions and subjunctives.Jesse R. Steinberg - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (3):323 - 341.
    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 (...)
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  17. Philosophy of nature and quantum reality.Ian J. Thompson - 2010 - Eagle Pearl Press.
    I formulate a description of the world of relativity and quantum physics that is independent of classical physics, so that we can bypass some of the unwanted legacies which have accumulated from the theories of material corpuscles. The task of this book is to produce a formulation in sufficient detail that an understanding of quantum physics begins to be possible. Even though the present investigations will not produce a complete physical theory, I hope to show that they are still valuable (...)
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  18. Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and Diagnosis.Richard H. Scheuermann, Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith - 2009 - In Proceedings of the 2009 AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics. American Medical Informatics Association.
    Many existing biomedical vocabulary standards rest on incomplete, inconsistent or confused accounts of basic terms pertaining to diseases, diagnoses, and clinical phenotypes. Here we outline what we believe to be a logically and biologically coherent framework for the representation of such entities and of the relations between them. We defend a view of disease as involving in every case some physical basis within the organism that bears a disposition toward the execution of pathological processes. We present our view in the (...)
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  19. Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience.Andrew Beards - 2008 - In Method in Metaphysics. University of Toronto Press. pp. 269-296.
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  20. Unfinkable dispositions.Toby Handfield - 2008 - Synthese 160 (2):297 - 308.
    This paper develops two ideas with respect to dispositional properties: (1) Adapting a suggestion of Sungho Choi, it appears the conceptual distinction between dispositional and categorical properties can be drawn in terms of susceptibility to finks and antidotes. Dispositional, but not categorical properties, are not susceptible to intrinsic finks, nor are they remediable by intrinsic antidotes. (2) If correct, this suggests the possibility that some dispositions—those which lack any causal basis—may be insusceptible to any fink or antidote. Since finks and (...)
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  21. On linking dispositions and conditionals.David Manley & Ryan Wasserman - 2008 - Mind 117 (465):59-84.
    Analyses of dispositional ascriptions in terms of conditional statements famously confront the problems of finks and masks. We argue that conditional analyses of dispositions, even those tailored to avoid finks and masks, face five further problems. These are the problems of: (i) Achilles' heels, (ii) accidental closeness, (iii) comparatives, (iv) explaining context sensitivity, and (v) absent stimulus conditions. We conclude by offering a proposal that avoids all seven of these problems.
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  22. Are Dispositions Causally Relevant?Jennifer Mckitrick - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):357-371.
    To determine whether dispositions are causally relevant, we have to get clear about what causal relevance is. Several characteristics of causal relevance have been suggested, including Explanatory Power, Counterfactual Dependence, Lawfullness, Exclusion, Independence, and Minimal Sufficiency. Different accounts will yield different answers about the causal relevance of dispositions. However, accounts of causal relevance that are the most plausible, for independent reasons, render the verdict that dispositions are causally relevant.
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  23. How dispositions can be causally relevant.Agustin Vicente - 2002 - Erkenntnis 56 (3):329-344.
    The problem this paper deals with is the problem of how dispositional properties can have causal relevance. In particular, the paper is focused on the question of how dispositions can have causal relevance given that the categorial bases that realise them seem to be sufficient to bring about the effects that dispositions explain. I show first that this problem of exclusion has no general solution. Then, I discuss some particular cases in which dispositions are causally relevant, despite of this exclusion (...)
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  24. Are dispositions reducible?George Molnar - 1999 - Philosophical Quarterly 49 (194):1-17.
  25. Dispositions. [REVIEW]Petri Ylikoski - 1999 - Dialogue 38 (1):175-177.
    This book is rather unorthodox in its composition. Instead of being a collection of essays, it consists of two series of debates between three writers. The first debate is between David Armstrong and U. T. Place, and consists of two contributions from both writers. The second debate is composed of C. B. Martin's essay "Properties and Dispositions," and two replies by each of the three authors. Although both debates are nominally about dispositions, they actually cover a wide array of questions (...)
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  26. Dispositions: A DebateD. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin, and U. T. Place Tim Crane, editor London: Routledge, 1996, viii + 197 pp. [REVIEW]Petri Ylikoski - 1999 - Dialogue 38 (1):175-.
  27. Finkish dispositions.David Kellogg Lewis - 1997 - Philosophical Quarterly 47 (187):143-158.
    Many years ago, C.B. Martin drew our attention to the possibility of ‘finkish’ dispositions: dispositions which, if put to the test would not be manifested, but rather would disappear. Thus if x if finkishly disposed to give response r to stimulus s, it is not so that if x were subjected to stimulus r, x would give response z; so finkish dispositions afford a counter‐example to the simplest conditional analysis of dispositions. Martin went on to suggest that finkish dispositions required (...)
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  28. Are physical properties dispositions?Nick Reeder - 1995 - Philosophy of Science 62 (1):141-149.
    Averill (1990) argues that not every property is a disposition. I claim here that his reasoning is faulty, suffering at one point from a logical error and at other points from an inadequate account of counterfactuals.
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  29. Dispositions, supervenience and reduction.Stephen Mumford - 1994 - Philosophical Quarterly 44 (177):419-438.
    Dispositions may be identical to their categorical bases but should we say, with Quine, that all properties are categorical or, with Popper, that all properties are dispositional? Both positions make implicit claims of ontological reduction but if this consists in nothing more than identity then, identity being a symmetrical relation, neither categorical nor dispositional monism is provided. A supervenience relation may be thought decisive, but if the identities are token- token, reduction is ruled out; if the identities are type- type (...)
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  30. Sunburn.Anthony Dardis - 1993 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (3):577-598.
    Causally committed properties are properties which require that their instances have a cause (or an effect) of a certain kind. Sunburn, for instance, must be caused by the sun. Causal relevance is a contingent dependency relation between properties of events. The connection between a causally committed property and the property to which it is committed is not contingent. Hence a pair consisting of a causally committed property and the property to which it is committed should not be in the causal (...)
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  31. Are physical properties dispositions?Edward Wilson Averill - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (1):118-132.
    Several prominent philosophers have held that physical properties are dispositions. The aim of this paper is to establish the following conjunction: if the thesis that physical properties are dispositions is unsupplemented by controversial assumptions about dispositions, it entails a contradiction; and if it is so supplemented the resulting theory has the consequence that either many worlds which seem to be possible worlds are not possible worlds or some properties which seem to be identical are not identical. In this way it (...)
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  32. Filling in space.Simon W. Blackburn - 1990 - Analysis 50 (2):62-5.
  33. Are dispositions ultimate? Reply to Franklin.D. M. Armstrong - 1988 - Philosophical Quarterly 38 (150):84-86.
    It is argued that it is possible that all properties are categorical, contrary to the arguments of Franklin that there must be dispositionality "all the way down". The tasks for which dispositionality is alleged to be needed can be fulfilled by laws of nature, which are categorical relations between universals.
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  34. Reply to Armstrong on dispositions.James Franklin - 1988 - Philosophical Quarterly 38 (150):86-87.
    Defends the arguments for the irredicibility of dispositions to categorical properties in "Are dispositions reducible to categorical properties?" (Philosophical Quarterly 36, 1986) against the criticisms of D.M. Armstrong (Philosophical Quarterly 38, 1988).
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  35. Are dispositions reducible to categorical properties?James Franklin - 1986 - Philosophical Quarterly 36 (142):62-64.
    Dispostions, such as solubility, cannot be reduced to categorical properties, such as molecular structure, without some element of dipositionaity remaining. Democritus did not reduce all properties to the geometry of atoms - he had to retain the rigidity of the atoms, that is, their disposition not to change shape when a force is applied. So dispositions-not-to, like rigidity, cannot be eliminated. Neither can dispositions-to, like solubility.
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  36. Dispositions and subjunctive conditionals, or, dormative virtues are no laughing matter.Elliott Sober - 1982 - Philosophical Review 91 (4):591-596.
    Philosophers frequently extract two lessons from Moliere's joke about the doctor who tried to explain why opium puts people to sleep by claiming that it has a dormative virtue. First, the principle I will call the equivalence thesis: attributions of dispositional properties are equivalent to certain associated subjunctive conditionals. The second is what I will call the reducibility thesis: for a dispositional concept to be nonproblematic, its “physical basis” must be found. In what follows, I will briefly describe three theoretical (...)
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  37. Dispositions, grounds, and causes.J. L. Mackie - 1977 - Synthese 34 (4):361 - 369.
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  38. Dispositional properties.A. D. Smith - 1977 - Mind 86 (343):439-445.
  39. Dispositions revisited.William W. Rozeboom - 1973 - Philosophy of Science 40 (1):59-74.
    Subjunctive conditionals have their uses, but constituting the meaning of dispositional predicates is not one of them. More germane is the analysis of dispositions in terms of "bases"--except that past efforts to maintain an ontic gap between dispositions and their bases, while not wholly misguided, have failed to appreciate the semantic birthright of dispositional concepts as a species of theoretical construct in primitive science.
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  40. Quine on dispositions and subvisible structures.Jon Moline - 1972 - Mind 81 (321):131-137.