Laws and Dispositions

Abstract

Laws are supposed to tell us how physical systems actually behave. The analysis of an important part of physical practice—abstraction—shows, however, that laws describe the behavior of physical systems under very special circumstances, namely when they are isolated. Nevertheless, laws are applied in cases of non-isolation as well. This practice requires an explanation. It is argued that one has to assume that physical systems have dispositions. I take these to be innocuous from an empiricist's standpoint because they can—at least in principle—be measured. Laws can be applied whenever such a disposition is present, they describe how the physical system would behave if the disposition were manifest.

1 | 1 | 2020 On Dispositions

“…There are several ways to interpret the reference of expressions belonging to the statements of cp laws in a realist way. According to Silverberg (1996) and Hüttemann (1998), cp laws bear on ideal circumstances that are rarely if ever realized. Hüttemann (1998, 129) states that "laws describe the behaviour of physical systems under very special conditions that are hardly ever realized, namely, in isolation".…”

Better Best Systems - Too Good To Be True

“…A dispositionalist holds that idealized laws are the statements about the behavior that an entity would manifest if this entity were undisturbed by or isolated from disturbing factors. But the BBSA as a Humean project is incompatible with this interpretation of idealizations, because the dispositionalist approach – at least in its standard formulation – accepts irreducible dispositions (Cartwright ; Hüttemann ; Bird ). Even if we grant that there is an anti‐Humean version of the BBSA, the dispositionalist account refers us back to the original problem that we introduced earlier: for the dispositionalist an idealized law is a claim about the behavior of an undisturbed or isolated system.…”

A Simulacrum Account of Dispositional Properties

“…Whether we view dispositions as properties of particulars (e.g. Hütteman ; Mumford ; Lipton ) or properties of kinds (e.g. Cartwright ; Lowe ), it seems a brute fact about glass and salt that the former is fragile and the latter is soluble .…”