Abstract
There are many arguments for denying capacities entitative status, but as they stand they are insufficient. On the one hand, there is the “stimulus-response” model for capacities.1 The logical form of a capacity proposition is, on this model, a modal conditional proposition; its antecedent expresses an operation in certain circumstances and its consequent expresses a realization of the putative capacity. Unless the conditional is explicitly modal, it cannot be relied upon to support a counterfactual conditional. But a capacity proposition does support some associated counterfactual conditional. The modality must be that of necessity.
[This is an abbreviated and revised version of Chapter X of the author’s Nature and Necessity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).]
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Notes
Cf., for example, Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), pp. 117-25 [cf. below, pp. 339-357].
Cf., for example, Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object ( New York: Technology Press and Wiley, 1960 ), pp. 222 - 25.
Cf. Bruce Aune, ‘Fisk on Capacities and Natures,’ Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science,ed. R. C. Buck and R. S. Cohen, Vol. 8 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), pp. 83-87. In light of Aune’s criticisms, I have been able to formulate the issue concerning modality and these two models for capacities more accurately.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,ed. A. C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), Book III, Chap. VI, Sec. 3.
Locke, Essay,Book III, Chap. VI, Sec. 6.
Cf. Roger Squires, ‘Are Dispositions Causes?’ Analysis 29 (1968), pp. 45 - 47.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality ( New York: Macmillan, 1929 ), p. 34.
Cf. D. M. Armstrong, ‘Dispositions and Causes,’ Analysis 30 (1969), pp. 23 - 26.
Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics,trans. Richard Hope (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 1046b28-1047a23.
Cf. David Weissman, Dispositional Properties ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965 ), p. 62.
Cf. Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 45 [cf. above, pp. 17-26]; Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), p. 424 [cf. above, pp. 147-153].
Cf. Isaac Levi, Gambling with Truth ( New York: Knopf, 1967 ), p. 196.
Cf. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), Part II, Chap. 6, p. 172.
For a full discussion of relevance logic, see A. R. Anderson and N. D. Belnap, Jr., Entailment ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975 ).
Cf. Milton Fisk, ‘A Defence of the Principle of Event Causality,’ British Journal for Philosophy of Science 18 (1967), pp. 89 - 108.
Cf. David Bohm, Quantum Theory (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951), pp. 175, 225.
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy ( New York: Harper Torchbook, 1962 ), p. 185.
Cf. Wilfrid Sellars, ‘The Language of Theories’ in his Science, Perception, and Reality ( New York: Humanities Press, 1963 ), pp. 106 - 26.
Cf. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (New York: International Publishers, 1927), Chap. 3, Sec. 3, p. 155.
Rom Harré notes in regard to his fine structure model for capacities that "There are further issues here, namely, the force of the modal operation…" (Powers,’ British Journal for Philosophy of Science 21 [1970], p. 101) [reprinted below, pp. 211-233]. See also Rom Harré, The Principles of Scientific Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 273.
Norwood Russell Hanson, ‘Logical Positivism and the Interpretation of Scientific Theories,’ mimeographed ( New Haven, Yale University, 1967 ).
Angus Ross, ‘Natural Kinds and Necessity,’ typescript ( Norwich, East Anglia University, 1969 ).
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 46, Article 2, ad 7, in The Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis, Vol. 1 ( New York: Random House, 1945 ), p. 455.
Willard Van Orman Quine, ‘Natural Kinds’ in his Ontological Relativity ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1969 ), p. 136.
Cf. Linus Pauling, The Nature of the Chemical Bond,2d ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), §43.
C. D. Broad, ‘The ‘Nature’ of a Continuant. In Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949 ), pp. 47281.
Cf. also M. R. Ayers, The Refutation of Determinism ( London: Methuen, 1968 ), p. 86.
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Fisk, M. (1978). Capacities and Natures. In: Tuomela, R. (eds) Dispositions. Synthese Library, vol 113. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1282-8_12
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