Minkish dispositions
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Minkish dispositions Alan Hájek1
Received: 10 August 2014 / Accepted: 30 December 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract Start with an ordinary disposition ascription, like ‘the wire is live’ or ‘the glass is fragile’. Lewis (Philos Quart 47:143–158, 1997) gives a canonical template for what he regards as the analysandum of such an ascription: “Something x is disposed at time t to give response r to stimulus s”. For example, (*) the wire is disposed at noon to conduct electrical current when touched by a conductor. What Lewis calls “the simple conditional analysis” gives putatively necessary and sufficient conditions for the analysandum in terms of a counterfactual: “if x were to undergo stimulus s at time t, x would give response r ”. Call this the counterfactual analysans. For example: (Would-conduct) If the wire were to be touched by a conductor at noon, the wire would conduct electricity. So we have three things in play: (1) the ordinary disposition ascription (e.g. ‘the wire is live’); (2) the canonical template (e.g. *) that is supposed to formalize this disposition ascription; and
Many thanks to Rachael Briggs, Alex Byrne, Brian Garrett, John Hawthorne, David Manley, Jeremy Strasser, and especially John Cusbert, Yoaav Isaacs, Hanti Lin, Aidan Lyon, John Maier, Daniel Nolan, Philip Pettit, Susanna Rinard, Wolfgang Schwarz, and an audience at Trnava University, and at the American Association of Philosophy (Pacific) meeting, 2015, for very helpful discussions. Further thanks to two anonymous referees for Synthese for extremely thorough and incisive comments. Research for this paper was supported in part by the Australian Research Council, Discovery Project DP130104665.
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Alan Hájek [email protected] School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
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Synthese
(3) the counterfactual analysans that is supposed to provided an analysis of the canonical template (e.g. Would-conduct). Finkish dispositions have been widely regarded as counterexamples to the adequacy of (3) as an analysis of (2). I will argue that they are not. They succeed, however, as counterexamples to the adequacy of (3) as an analysis of (1). That said, the classic cases are somewhat contrived. I will introduce the notion of a minkish disposition: a disposition that something has, even though it might not display it in response to the relevant stimulus. Cases of minkish dispositions are entirely familiar. They refute the adequacy of (3) both as an analysis of (2) and of (1). I will argue that they also refute Lewis’s own, more complicated counterfactual analysis of dispositions, and bring out an internal tension in his views. Keywords Dispositions · Counterfactuals · Finkish · Lewis · Martin · Intrinsic properties · Chance
1 The simple counterfactual analysis Start with an ordinary disposition ascription, like ‘the wire is live’ or ‘the glass is fragile’. Lewis (1997) gives a canonical template for what he regards as the analysandum of such an ascription: “Something x is disposed at
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