260036 Irritability, Toxicity and Fragility: The Puzzling Metaphysics of Dispositions (GradS) (SoSe 2021)

We are all familiar with signs indicating slippery surfaces, poisonous substances, or the fragility of a package’s content. We explain the actions of other people by their irritability or their courage. And in science, properties like mass, charge, pluripotency, evolvability, and fitness take center stage. All these are considered to be examples of dispositional properties.

Dispositions are closely associated to certain manifestations (e.g., annoyance or anger in case of irritability, bodily damage in case of toxicity, and shattering in case of fragility) and also to certain conditions under which these manifestations typically occur (e.g., being provoked, being ingested, or being struck). One puzzling feature of dispositions is that our ascriptions of these properties do not depend on their constant manifestation: a substance can be toxic without causing bodily damage, and a vase can be fragile without being shattered.

In this seminar, we read the book “Dispositional Pluralism” by Jennifer McKitrick (OUP, 2018) as a guide into the metaphysical issues around dispositions
In her view, when an object has a disposition, it is such that its manifestation would occur if a certain type of circumstance were to occur –a view that turns dispositions very abundant and diverse.

Besides the classic debate on how dispositions have to be analyzed and whether such an analysis is possible in the first place, McKitrick discusses the crucial questions of whether dispositions have to be grounded in some other properties (such as the microstructure of glass in case of fragility), whether dispositions need a trigger, whether dispositions can manifest in other dispositional properties, whether dispositions are internal or external properties, whether dispositions are causally efficacious and whether dispositions can play roles in causal explanations.

Bibliography

McKitrick, Jennifer. 2018. Dispositional Pluralism. Oxford University Press.

Additional readings will be announced during the course.