Tropes, Unmanifested Dispositions and Powerful Qualities

Coates, Ashley

doi:10.1007/s10670-020-00295-4

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…According to an influential argument originally due to Armstrong (1997: 79;1999: 29-30;2002: 168-169), this fact raises serious difficulties for DE. Elsewhere, I reconstruct this argument as follows (Coates 2020a: 3):…”

Section: The Problem Of Unmanifested Powersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is worth noting in this respect that categoricalists, unlike dispositional essentialists, have often accepted purely modal conceptions of dispositions, most influentially in the form of attempted counterfactual analyses of dispositions. I (Coates 2020a) have also proposed responding to the argument from unmanifested powers by invoking a version of the powerful qualities view, which combines a purely modal conception of dispositions with the idea that these dispositions are grounded in purely qualitative properties. Both of these views can employ a purely modal conception of dispositions to get around the problem of unmanifested powers without generating concerns about the robustness of actuality and its distinctness from mere possibility, just because they deny that fundamental or natural properties have dispositional essences.…”

Section: The Problem Of Unmanifested Powersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unmanifested powers and universals

Coates

2022

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According to a well-known argument against dispositional essentialism, the nature of unmanifested token powers leaves dispositional essentialists with an objectionable commitment to the reality of non-existent entities. The idea is that, because unmanifested token powers are directed at their non-existent token manifestations, they require the reality of those manifestations. Arguably the most promising response to this argument works by claiming that, if properties are universals, dispositional directedness need only entail the reality of actually existing manifestation types. I argue that this response fails, because no version of the response can adequately accommodate dispositions of the sort that follow from Coulomb's law. This result both defeats an important argument that dispositional essentialists ought to be realists about universals and appears to leave dispositional essentialists with a problematic commitment to either non-relational connections or a Meinongian ontology. IntroductionAccording to dispositional essentialism (DE), the essences of at least some natural properties are exhausted by their dispositional roles. 1 Here I refer to these properties as 'powers'. An object's having a power, then, consists just in its having certain dispositions. To take a 1 Well-known versions of DE include Molnar (2003), Heil (2003, Mumford (2004), Bird (2007) and Whittle (2008).2 common example, if fragility is a natural property, then it is a good candidate for a power, as an object's being fragile appears to consist just in its being disposed toward breaking.As this example indicates, for an object to have a power is, at least in part, for that object to be dispositionally directed toward a specific manifestation or set of manifestations. For a vase to be fragile, for instance, is for it to be dispositionally directed at its breaking. I will express this point by saying that token powers are directed at their manifestations. 2 This directedness of token powers leads to a well-known difficulty for DE. Given that a relation is real only if its relata are, token powers' directedness at their manifestations appears to entail that the manifestation of any token power is real. The manifestations of unmanifested token powers, though, do not actually exist. For instance, where the fragility of a vase is unmanifested, the vase's being broken does not actually exist. The consequence appears to be that the manifestations of unmanifested token powers are real despite not actually existing. DE, then, appears to be committed to an objectionable 'Meinongian' ontology on which there are real but non-existent entities.The two main dispositional essentialist responses to this problem have been to claim that directedness is not a genuine relation and to invoke universals. The idea behind the first approach is that, because directedness is not a genuine relation, a token power's directedness at its manifestation does not entail that the manifestation is real. According to the second approach, which following Bird (2007: 106) I...

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Section: The Problem Of Unmanifested Powersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Problem Of Unmanifested Powersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unmanifested powers and universals

Coates

2022

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“…A disposition, D, can be understood as a modal relation between stimulus, S, and manifestation, M, properties; D is the disposition to M when S. Fragility, for example, is a disposition to shatter when stressed, i.e., a modal relation between the properties being stressed and shattering. The dispositional relation is modal because an individual can be disposed to shatter when stressed even if it is never actually stressed and so never actually shatters (see, e.g., Tugby (2013); Coates (2020bCoates ( , 2022). Bird understands powers in terms of dispositions as follows:…”

Section: Bird's Conception Of Powersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It would be beyond the scope of this paper to provide an argument in favour of QDE. But the point of this paper is not to defend QDE (this task is taken up by Tugby (2012Tugby ( , 2020Tugby ( , 2022a ;Coates, (2020b); Kimpton-Nye, (2018) but is rather to argue that if QDE is the true account of the metaphysics of powers, then Bird's argument against macro powers is unsound and, in fact, pandispositionalism is true. This is a significant conclusion because QDE is gaining increasing traction in the literature on powers and pandispositionalism is an interesting and controversial thesis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Pandispositionalism and the metaphysics of powers

Kimpton‐Nye

2022

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Some philosophers maintain that physical properties are irreducibly modal: that properties are powers. Powers are then employed to provide explanations of other phenomena of philosophical interest such as laws of nature and modality. There is, however, a dispute among powers theorists about how far the powers ontology extends: are all manner of properties at all levels of fundamentality powers or are powers only to be found among the fundamental properties? This paper argues that the answer to this question depends on the details of the metaphysics of powers. More specifically, this paper argues that if one understands powers as qualitative grounds of dispositions (call this qualitative dispositional essentialism), as opposed to properties whose essences are constituted by dispositions (as orthodox dispositional essentialists would have it), then all properties, be they fundamental or macro, are powers, i.e., pandispositionalism is true. The Conclusion: If qualitative dispositional essentialism is true, then pandispositionalism is true, is significant because there is increasing concern that orthodox dispositional essentialism is explanatorily deficient and perhaps even incoherent, meaning that qualitative dispositional essentialism is gaining increasing support in the literature on powers. All things considered, then, it is beginning to look more likely that pandispositionalism is true simpliciter.

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Introduction

Azzano

2024

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Tropes, Unmanifested Dispositions and Powerful Qualities

Cited by 8 publications

References 35 publications

Unmanifested powers and universals

Unmanifested powers and universals

Pandispositionalism and the metaphysics of powers

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