The Simple Counterfactual Analysis (SCA) was once considered the most promising analysis of disposition ascriptions. According to SCA, disposition ascriptions are to be analyzed in terms of counterfactual conditionals. In the last few decades, however, SCA has become the target of a battery of counterexamples. In all counterexamples, something seems to be interfering with a certain object’s hav...

Many philosophers hold that all dispositions must have independent causal bases. I challenge this view, hence defending the possibility of bare dispositions. In part 1, I explain more fully what I mean by "disposition," "causal basis," and "bare disposition." In part 2, I consider the claim that the concept of a disposition entails that dispositions are not bare. dispositions necessarily have d...

In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll offers a novel theory of dispositions in terms of primitive directed states. Kroll is clear that his notion of directedness “outstrips talk of goals, purposes, design, and function” (##), and that it commits him to “primitive teleological facts” (##). This notion may strike some as outdated and unscientific, but Kroll argues that it has an important th...

This article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation of the mother’s brother and sister’s son in patrilineal societies in the light both of anthropological criticisms of the very notion of kinship and of evolutionary and epidemiological approaches to culture. It argues that the ritualized patterns of behavior discussed by Radcliffe-Brown, Goody, and others are to be explained in te...

Dispositions and tendencies feature significantly in the biomedical domain and therefore in representations of knowledge of that domain. They are not only important for specific applications like an infectious disease ontology, but also as part of a general strategy for modelling knowledge about molecular interactions. But the task of representing dispositions in some formal ontological systems...

In this paper, I distinguish two often-conflated theses—the thesis that all dispositions are intrinsic properties and the thesis that the causal bases of all dispositions are intrinsic properties—and argue that the falsity of the former does not entail the falsity of the latter. In particular, I argue that extrinsic dispositions are a counterexample to first thesis but not necessarily to the se...

In Briggs and Nolan 2012, we suggested that advocates of a Nozickian tracking theory of knowledge might do well to appeal to dispositions rather than counterfactuals. (Gundersen 2003 and 2010 makes a similar suggestion, though he prefers a dispositional account of counterfactuals that enables him to retain a conditional tracking analysis.) John Turri (2012) and Ben Bronner (2012) have offered a...

We propose a taxonomy of mereological relations between dispositions, as well as a series of axioms relating the bearers, triggers or realizations of disposition-complexes and disposition-parts. We apply them on a use case to show how basic dispositions can be combined to express elaborate dispositions. We consider whether those relations of partial ordering satisfy axioms of composition and de...