Dispositionality, categoricity, and where to find them
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Dispositionality, categoricity, and where to find them Lorenzo Azzano1 Received: 4 February 2020 / Accepted: 14 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Discussions about dispositional and categorical properties have become commonplace in metaphysics. Unfortunately, dispositionality and categoricity are disputed notions: usual characterizations are piecemeal and not widely applicable, thus threatening to make agreements and disagreements on the matter merely verbal—and also making it arduous to map a logical space of positions about dispositional and categorical properties in which all parties can comfortably fit. This paper offers a prescription for this important difficulty, or at least an inkling thereof. This will be achieved by comparing pairs of positions and exploring their background metaphysics to discover where alleged agreements and disagreements concerning dispositionality and categoricity really lie; more specifically, the Pure Powers view (according to which properties are just dispositional) and the Powerful Qualities view (according to which properties are also categorical) will be under scrutiny. Over this background, the prescription functions by isolating a successful identity-based characterization of categoricity, while abandoning the correspondent identity-based characterization of dispositionality. On the contrary, according to this prescription a property is dispositional if and only if it is solely in virtue of possessing that property that its bearer is assigned a certain dispositional profile. A crucial consequence of this prescription is that, while supporters of the Pure Powers view often characterize their position as an essentialist one, the dispositionality of properties needn’t always be a matter of essence. Keywords Dispositional properties · Categorical properties · Pure powers · Powerful qualities · Categoricalism · Grounding
1 Introduction Discussions about whether properties are dispositional or categorical have become commonplace in recent metaphysics and philosophy of science; yet there is no ortho-
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Lorenzo Azzano [email protected]; [email protected] Department of Letters, Philosophy, Communication, University of Bergamo, Via Pignolo 123, CAP 24121 Bergamo, Italy
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Synthese
dox, or even widely accepted characterization of a dispositional property as opposed to a categorical one.1 This isn’t a new difficulty, either: early discussions on the so-called “mark of the dispositional”, conducted either through conditional entailment or the association with intentionality, reveal the struggle the first contemporary supporters of dispositional properties had to go through to narrow down their subject of enquiry; as for the categorical properties, more than twenty years ago Mumford (1998: p. 75) writes that. it is quite difficult to find, anywhere in the literature, a specification of what exactly is intended by ‘categorical property’ and it is a symptomatic of the vagueness of the distinction accepted thus far that a number of different things are usually put
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