Armstrong and the modal inversion of dispositions

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 55, Issue 220, 2005, Pages 452-461

  Handfield, Toby ^a  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949306316     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00410.x     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. D.M. Armstrong, What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge UP, 1983, hereafter WLN)
2. F.I. Dretske, 'Laws of Nature', Philosophy of Science, 44 (1977), pp. 248-68
3. M. Tooley, 'The Nature of Laws', Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1977), pp. 667-98
4. See, for example, B. Ellis, Scientific Essentialism (Cambridge UP, 2001)
5. G. Molnar, Powers (Oxford UP, 2003)
6. S. Shoemaker, 'Causality and Properties', repr. in his Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge UP, 1984), pp. 206-33
7. R. Holton, 'Dispositions All the Way Round', Analysis, 59 (1999), pp. 9-14, has recently defended the coherence of this variety of modal inversion
8. See C.B. Martin, 'Dispositions and Conditionals', The Philosophical Quarterly, 44 (1994), pp. 1-8
9. Depending upon how quickly I spring into action, my bucket-activities may constitute either a 'fink', a process that makes the object lose the causal base of the disposition before it can manifest, or an 'antidote', a process which does not remove the basis of the disposition, but which interferes with the causal process between stimulus and manifestation. See A. Bird, 'Dispositions and Antidotes', The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998), pp. 227-34
10. D. Lewis, 'Finkish Dispositions', The Philosophical Quarterly, 47 (1997), pp. 143-58
11. M. Smith and D. Stoljar, 'Global Response-Dependence and Noumenal Realism', The Monist, 81 (1998), pp. 85-111, at §3
12. Alexander Bird has independently put forward a similar argument. See his 'The Ultimate Argument against Armstrong's Contingent Necessitation View of Laws', Analysis, 65 (2005), pp. 147-55
13. also 'Potency and Modality', Synthese (forthcoming)
14. See also Lewis, 'New Work for a Theory of Universals', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1983), pp. 343-77, at p. 366