Dispositional Essentialism: Alive and Well

Dispositions and Ontology

“…And thus we end up with the sort of "Tinkertoy" ontology that we have been discussing, a n ontology t h a t understands the world in terms of things and their properties standing in relations to things and their properties and within which dispositions are seen as, at best, a kind of second-class citizen. [21][22] Notes l See, for example, Weissman 1965, Mellor 1974, Fetzer 1977, a number of t h e papers in Tuomela 1978, Tiles 1985, and Thompson 1988 See, for example, Armstrong, Martin, and Place 1996, Miiller 1997-and the articles following, especially, Ham6 1997and Cart-Wright 1997-Anderson 1997, Mumford 1998, Molnar 1999, and Mellor 2000. Armstrong (1997) notes that the term 'disposition' is most naturally applied to the passive powers-rather than to t h e active powers-of a particular thing, although contemporary philosophical usage does not always abide by this.…”