Unmanifested powers and universals

Abstract

According to a well-known argument against dispositional essentialism, the nature of unmanifested token powers leaves dispositional essentialists with an objectionable commitment to the reality of non-existent entities. The idea is that, because unmanifested token powers are directed at their non-existent token manifestations, they require the reality of those manifestations. Arguably the most promising response to this argument works by claiming that, if properties are universals, dispositional directedness need only entail the reality of actually existing manifestation types. I argue that this response fails, because no version of the response can adequately accommodate dispositions of the sort that follow from Coulomb's law. This result both defeats an important argument that dispositional essentialists ought to be realists about universals and appears to leave dispositional essentialists with a problematic commitment to either non-relational connections or a Meinongian ontology. IntroductionAccording to dispositional essentialism (DE), the essences of at least some natural properties are exhausted by their dispositional roles. 1 Here I refer to these properties as 'powers'. An object's having a power, then, consists just in its having certain dispositions. To take a 1 Well-known versions of DE include Molnar (2003), Heil (2003, Mumford (2004), Bird (2007) and Whittle (2008).2 common example, if fragility is a natural property, then it is a good candidate for a power, as an object's being fragile appears to consist just in its being disposed toward breaking.As this example indicates, for an object to have a power is, at least in part, for that object to be dispositionally directed toward a specific manifestation or set of manifestations. For a vase to be fragile, for instance, is for it to be dispositionally directed at its breaking. I will express this point by saying that token powers are directed at their manifestations. 2 This directedness of token powers leads to a well-known difficulty for DE. Given that a relation is real only if its relata are, token powers' directedness at their manifestations appears to entail that the manifestation of any token power is real. The manifestations of unmanifested token powers, though, do not actually exist. For instance, where the fragility of a vase is unmanifested, the vase's being broken does not actually exist. The consequence appears to be that the manifestations of unmanifested token powers are real despite not actually existing. DE, then, appears to be committed to an objectionable 'Meinongian' ontology on which there are real but non-existent entities.The two main dispositional essentialist responses to this problem have been to claim that directedness is not a genuine relation and to invoke universals. The idea behind the first approach is that, because directedness is not a genuine relation, a token power's directedness at its manifestation does not entail that the manifestation is real. According to the second approach, which following Bird (2007: 106) I...

Pandispositionalism and the metaphysics of powers

“…A disposition, D, can be understood as a modal relation between stimulus, S, and manifestation, M, properties; D is the disposition to M when S. Fragility, for example, is a disposition to shatter when stressed, i.e., a modal relation between the properties being stressed and shattering. The dispositional relation is modal because an individual can be disposed to shatter when stressed even if it is never actually stressed and so never actually shatters (see, e.g., Tugby (2013); Coates (2020bCoates ( , 2022). Bird understands powers in terms of dispositions as follows:…”