Explanatory dispositionalism
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Explanatory dispositionalism What anti-Humeans should say Barbara Vetter1 Received: 28 October 2019 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract 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 (some say) 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 to be understood neither as a view about ontology (the existence of certain properties) nor about fundamentality, but rather as a specific claim about what explains what. Keywords Anti-Humeanism · Dispositions · Dispositionalism · Ontology · Metaphysics
1 Introduction What is metaphysics all about? According to the Quinean tradition (most prominently, Quine 1948), metaphysics is basically ontology, a matter of answering the question ‘what there is’ (and, in the second instance, how things are; see Janssen-Lauret (2017, p. 6). Ontological theories earn their keep by providing explanations; their assessment is a matter of weighing the ontological costs against the explanatory benefits. According to an older tradition that has recently had a revival (e.g., Schaffer 2009), metaphysics is not primarily about what there is but about ‘what grounds what’: the explanatory orders and hierarchies among what there is. On this approach, explanation is not relegated to the task of evaluating theories; it belongs in the content of metaphys-
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Barbara Vetter [email protected] Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, 14195 Berlin, Germany
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ical theories.1 The explanatory conception, in turn, allows for two readings. A liberal reading takes metaphysics to be about explanatory relations at all levels of reality; a more restrictive reading takes it to be properly concerned only with that which explains everything else: the ultimate explanantia, the fundamental. This latter reading is then neatly combined with a similarly restrictive reading of the Quinean answer, where metaphysics is about what there is fundamentally—those existents which explain all others. One aim of this paper is to apply this second-order debate on the aims of metaphysics to a central first-order metaphysical debate, the debate between Humeans and antiHumeans. Humeanism finds its canonical (if incomplete) formulation in David Lewis’s thesis of Humean supervenience: the view that ‘all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another … we have an arrangement of qualities. And that is all. … All else supervenes on that’ (Lewis 1986b, p. ix f). Humean supervenience, in this formulation, is first and foremost a view on ontology, on what there is: an arr
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