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On What There Is (In Space)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2008
Abstract
Dispositions depend on “categorical” facts definitionally and pedagogically. Must they always depend on them also ontologically for “grounding”? Does there really have to be an ultimate “bottom level” of matter, and must it be “categorical”? The concepts microphysics supplies, however, are dispositional in meaning. What predicates aren't? Besides “shaping” and “locating” predicates, predicates expressing degrees of similarity and dissimilarity are nondispositional enough in meaning: but the predication of all these features of things depends upon other features for these to bound and to relate to one another comparatively. Faced with the uncomfortable alternative of “dispositions all the way down” Simon Blackburn proposes antirealism. Possibly, though, predicates' dispositionality or categoricality can be relative to a given level of the organization of matter.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2008
References
1 That is what “we say”, I wrote. But what about “scholastic realists” who see the causal grounding of a disposition as causing the disposition, and the disposition as then independently causing the actualization under triggering conditions? Indeed, any positing of a metaphysically ultimate law of nature amounts to crediting a posited disposition with not just an existence ontologically independent of its causal grounding, but an existence absolutely uncaused. However, that, in fact, is one of the alternatives facing scientific realism, I go on to argue.
2 Blackburn, Simon, ‘Filling in Space’, Analysis, Volume 50, No. 2 (March 1990), 62–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Cf. Goldstick, D., ‘Property Identity and ‘Intrinsic’ Designation', Philosophy, Volume 72, No. 281 (July 1977), pp. 449–452CrossRefGoogle Scholar.