Dispositional Metaphysics and Neutral Monism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69967/07194773.v1i3.95Keywords:
dispositions, property monism, scientific explanation, realism, Quntum MechanicsAbstract
The philosophical debate about dispositions acquired an increasingly metaphysicaltone in recent times. This shift was driven by the methodological failure of the reductionist project.Paradoxes of material implication and the inability to assign necessary and sufficient conditionsfor the manifestation of powers in things undermined the claim of achieving purely conditionaldefinitions of dispositional ascriptions. Stephen Mumford was one of the first philosophers to pro-mote a realistic approach to dispositional properties as a means of understanding their predicationconditions. In his bookDispositions(1998), Mumford promotes a functionalist monism accordingto which the instance or token of a dispositional property does not differ ontologically from the categorical basis underlying its manifestation: the conceptual distinction between them is basedon purely epistemic issues. In this paper I shall offer a brief overview of the current state of thedebate about dispositions and display some shortcomingsof Mumford's proposal. It is argued thatthe monistic thesis precludes the possibility of a realistic recovery of Quantum Mechanics' dispo-sitional phenomena; also, that the functionalist criterion of identity between instantiated disposi-tions and their categorical basis is unacceptable.
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