In defence of the conditional account of dispositions

Synthese

Volumn 130, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 389-411

  Gundersen, Lars ^a,b  

^a AARHUS UNIVERSITY   (Denmark)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 20744449731     PISSN: 00397857     EISSN: 15730964     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1014845625688     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. See his 1994, 'Dispositions and Conditionals', The Philosophical Quarterly 44.
2. Dispositional masking and mimicking first appeared in print in Mark Johnston: 1992, 'How to Speak of the Colors', Philosophical Studies 68, 221-263.
3. S. Mumford: 1996, 'Conditionals, Functional Essence and Martin on Dispositions', The Philosophical Quarterly 46, 86-92.
4. David Lewis: 1997, 'Finkish Dispositions', The Philosophical Quarterly 47, 143-158.
5. Jonathan Kvanvig: 1999, 'Lewis on Finkish Dispositions', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 49, 703-710.
6. Alexander Bird: 1998, 'Dispositions and Antidotes', The Philosophical Quarterly 48, 227-234.
7. As developed in Stalnaker and Lewis's works on subjunctive semantics. Lewis terms offence against the principle 'the fallacy of strengthening the antecedent'.
8. This example is originally due to D.H. Mellor: 1974, 'In Defence of Dispositions', Philosophical Review 83, 157-181. It has subsequently been modified by inter alia Mumford ('Conditionals, Functional Essence and Martin on Dispositions') and Bird ('Dispositions and Antidotes').
9. L. B. Gundersen: 2000, 'Bird on Dispositions and Antidotes', The Philosophical Quarterly 50, 227-229.
10. Alexander Bird: 2000, 'Further Antidotes - A Reply to Gundersen', The Philosophical Quarterly 50, 229-233.
11. But wait, are CA not, qua philosophical thesis, not already a modal claim? If so, we need only the characteristic S4 axiom (A → A) for any CA* counterexamples also to undermine CA. The answer is that CA certainly has some modal status. That modal status is, however, better characterises in terms of a priority. It is worth here comparing with e.g., a physicalistic theory of colour. It is central claim in such theories that colours are caused by physicalistic properties of objects such as their surface corrugation. If this claim it true it is, qua philosophical thesis, a priori true; but certainly not necessarily true: it is false in a whole lot of possible worlds in which our cognitive apparatus are not so designed to interact causally with these physicalistic features. Likewise could an evolutionary theory of epistemic externalism (which claims that evolution has proved it most favourable for humans not to be capable of justifying certain beliefs by internalist standards) be true although certainly not necessarily true. For a defence of a priori, nonmodal, armchair philosophy see Frank Jackson's Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford, 1998), Ch. 6.
12. And, again, it is important to emphasise that it has to be sufficiently nearby environments that matter for the semantics - not merely the nearest environment (pace Lewis and Stalnaker). Otherwise we are back in a situation in which the mere actual truth of P and Q, that is P and Q being true in the nearest scenario, implies that P subjunctively implies Q.
13. Cf. The Principle of Compositionality Strictness.
14. The Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1997), pp. 143-158.
15. I here follow Bird's lead in mereological surgery (Bird 1998).
16. See for instance Monist (1998) special issue on secondary qualities and European Philosophical Reviw 3 (1998).
17. The example is discussed in Simon Blackburn's (1993), 'Circles, Finks, Smells and Biconditionals', Philosophical Perspectives 7.
18. 'Conditionals, Functional Essence and Martin on Dispositions', The Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1996).
19. This worry is expressed by e.g., Bird, 'Dispositions and Antidotes', p. 231.
20. Finkish Dispositions', p. 154.