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The Empiricist Account of Dispositions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

Besides the observable properties it exhibits and the actual processes it undergoes, a thing is full of threats and promises. The dispositions or capacities of a thing — its flexibility, its inflammability, its solubility — are no less important to us than its overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. And so we are moved to inquire whether we can bring them down to earth; whether, that is, we can explain disposition terms without any reference to occult powers.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1975

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References

page 184 note 1 Goodman, N., Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Indiana, 1965) p. 40Google Scholar

page 185 note 1 Carnap, R., ‘Testability and Meaning’, Classics of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Ammerman, R. R. (New York, 1965) p. 145Google Scholar, and ‘Methodological Character ofTheoretical Concepts’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, I, ed. Feigl, H., Scriven, M. (Minneapolis, 1956) p. 63Google Scholar; Hempel, C. G., Aspects of Scientific Explantation (New York, 1965) p. 109Google Scholar; Pap, A., ‘Are physical magnitudes operationally definable?’, Measurement: Definitions and Theories, ed. Churchman, C. W., Tatoosh, P. (New York, 1959) p. 178.Google Scholar

page 186 note 1 Ryle, G., The Concept of Mind (London, 1949) pp. 43, 123 (my italics).Google Scholar

page 186 note 2 Usually one finds something like ‘x is D at t1’ being equated with something like ‘Oxt1Rxt1’ so that, presumably, (1 perm) would be equated with (2). See Carnap, 's ‘Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science’, Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Feigl, H., Sellars, W. (New York, 1949) p. 416Google Scholar; Hempel, 's ‘Methods of concept formation in science’, Foundations of the Unity of Science, II, ed. Neurath, O., Carnap, R., Morris, C. (Chicago and London, 1970) pp. 676–7Google Scholar; Pap, 's ‘Are physical magnitudes operationally definable?’, pp. 178–80Google Scholar, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (London, 1963) p. 280Google Scholar, and ‘Dispositional concepts and extensional logic’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, II, ed. Feigl, H., Scriven, M., Maxwell, G. (Minneapolis, 1958) p. 198Google Scholar. See also R. B. Braithwaite, The nature of believing', Knowledge and Belief, ed. Griffiths, A. Phillips (London, 1967) p. 35Google Scholar; Mackie, J.L., Truth Probability and Paradox (London, 1973) pp. 123–7Google Scholar; and Price, H. H., Belief (London, 1969) pp. 246–7.Google ScholarPubMed

page 187 note 1 Sellars, W. S., Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, Illinois, 1969) p. 119.Google Scholar

page 187 note 2 For further discussion and the logic of such bells see my ‘Tensed Modalities’, Journal of Philosophical Logic, II (1973).Google Scholar

page 190 note 1 It is perhaps worth making clear that in saying that (2P) is such that something fails to satisfy it if there ever is a time at which it is under pressure and not bending, and hence such that something which ever fails to satisfy it always fails to satisfy it I am not (of course) saying that if there ever is a time at which something is under pressure and not bending then at no time at which it is under pressure is it bending. That is, something which at some times is bending under pressure is not thereby something which, in the normal sense intended here, ‘satisfies’ (2P).

page 190 note 2 Rescher, N., ‘On the logic of chronological propositions’, Mind, LXXV (1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 190 note 3 Having introduced the R-operator one should perhaps treat ‘is under pressure’ as a one-placed tensed predicate and so write ‘x is under pressure at t’ as ‘RtOx’ - and (2D t1), for example, as ‘Rti(t)(RtOx→RtRx)’ But I shall continue to treat it as a fwo-placed predicate which takes as arguments an individual and a time.

page 194 note 1 I suspect that the same mistake is made about the sense-datum hypotheticals which empiricists have wanted to substitute for material object statements.

page 194 note 2 Cf. my ‘Leibniz's Principle of Pre-Determinate History’, Stadia Leibnitiana, VII (1975).Google Scholar

page 195 note 1 Armstrong, D. M., A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London, 1968) p.86.Google Scholar

page 195 note 2 Bennett, J. F., Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford, 1971) p. 105.Google Scholar

page 198 note 1 Alston, W. P., ‘Dispositons and Occurences’, Canadian Journal of Philosphy, I (1971) p. 143Google Scholar. See also Broad, C. D., An Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy, I (Cambridge, 1933) p. 271Google Scholar; Price, H. H., Thinking and Experience, 2nd. ed. (London, 1969) p. 322.Google Scholar

page 199 note 1 See my ‘Tensed Modalities’, Journal of Philosophical Logic, II (1973).Google Scholar