Does Anything Break Because it is Fragile? :: Philosophy Philosophers Essays

Does Anything Break Be crap it is Fragile?ABSTRACT I continue that dispositions be non causatively relevant to their manifestations. The paper begins with a oppose argument, which is intended to undermine David Lewis recent attempt to restore causal strength to dispositions by identifying their instantiations with the instantiations of their causal bases. I conclude that Lewis attempt to vindicate the causal credentials of dispositions meets obstacles that are analogous to (though importantly different from) those that beset Donald Davidsons attempt to accord a causal role to the mental. I thence consider an argument recently given by Frank capital of Mississippi against the causal relevance of dispositions (to their manifestations). Jacksons argument relies on a conception of dispositions that is not likely to be shared by those who check their causal relevance. I sketch an alternative conception of dispositions that links them more closely to their causal bases, but argue t hat even on this lay dispositions are causally impotent. The paper closes with a defense of the claim that dispositions, in spite of their causal irrelevance to their manifestations, are nevertheless causal-explanatorily relevant to them. We project dispositions as creation causally responsible for their manifestations. We say that the glass skint because it was fragile, that the rubber band stretched because it is elastic, and that the arsenic killed him because it was lethal. Some philosophers have denied this. According to them, dispositions are causally irrelevant to the effects in terms of which they are defined. This belief was defended by Elizabeth Prior, Robert Pargetter and Frank Jackson, and has been (tentatively) endorsed by David Lewis. According to them, fragility is the second-order property of having whatsoever or other first-order property (e.g., a given molecular structure) that tends to cause breaking under certain circumstances. But then, they infer, it is th is first-order feature (the causal basis of the glasss fragility), and not fragility itself, that is responsible for causing the breaking. Fragility is thus conceptually afterwards the fact as concerns the causation of breaking the glass counts as being fragile only in consequence of its having some other, first-order property that is causally responsible for its breaking when struck.Lewis has always seemed uneasy with this view. He has called it a stressful oddity that must be dispatched if the identification of dispositions with second-order properties is to win our unequivocal support. In a recent paper, he takes himself to have done just that.