Abstract
A common habit of speech, a recent trend in philosophy, and the apparent ease of expressing in counterfactual form what we want to say about dispositions and possible entities make it natural to begin with the problem of counterfactual conditionals. Nowadays I think few of us are any longer willing to accept a counterfactual conditional, however impressively intoned, as providing in itself an explanation that requires no further analysis. The legal mind investigating the question what is meant by the value of real estate may rest content with the pronouncement that the value is the price the property would bring if it were sold by a willing seller to a willing buyer; but the philosopher (at least I) will regard this as reframing the question rather than answering it.
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Notes
Cf. the discussion in Morton White’s ‘Ontological Clarity and Semantic Obscurity’ in the Journal of Philosophy,vol. xlviii (1951), pp. 373-80.
Although I use the term ‘counterfactual’ thus narrowly here, convenience is often served by including semifactuals—with false antecedents and true consequents—among the counterfactuals.
But it is often neglected in published discussions of counterfactuals. The problem of relevant conditions—most acutely felt as the problem of cotenability—does not, as some writers seem to suppose, reduce in any ready and obvious way to the problem of law.
I am not alone in this opinion. For example, Roderick Chisholm in a review in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,September 1953 (vol. 14), p. 120, has written concerning my article on counterfactuals: "It is safe to say, I think, that the extensive amount of material which has subsequently been published on this difficult philosophical problem has not thrown any additional light upon it."
I have no illusion that this constitutes an adequate definition of the distinction between dispositional and manifest predicates. Indeed this distinction, like that between primitive and defined terms, may be a purely relative one. A predicate like ‘bends’, for example, may be dispositional under a phenomenalistic system; and there may be no terms that are manifest—as there are no terms that are primitive—for all systems. The particular distinction drawn in the above text is thus perhaps best regarded as one chosen for the purpose of illustrating in a convenient and natural way the general problem of construing dispositional predicates on the basis of whatever predicates may be chosen as manifest.
Concerning the non-designative rôle of predicates, see various articles by W. V. Quine, e.g. Essays I and II in his From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge ( Mass.) and London, 1953. However, the reader’s assent to Quine’s views is not essential to my present purpose. I am primarily concerned above with pointing out that the problem about dispositional predicates does not arise from their failing to perform some designatory function that is performed by manifest predicates.
For the essential characters of things are usually thought of as enduring, and it is the predicates for enduring characters that we normally regard as dispositional. Thus those who propose to deal with the problem of dispositions by means of classes defined in terms of the microcosmic structure of things often beg the question; for among the dispositional predicates they set out to explain lie the very predicates they need for describing these structures.
The view to be discussed in this and the following paragraph is by now so prevalent that I felt it must be dealt with here even at the cost of digressing from the main course of our investigation. See Carnap, ‘Testability and Meaning’ in Philosophy of Science, vol. 3 (1936), especially p. 449 [cf. above, pp. 3-16]; Kaplan, ‘Definition and Specification of Meaning’ in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. xliii (1946), pp. 281-8—also my review of this article in the Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 11 (1946), p. 80; and Hempel, Fundamentals of Concept Formation, Chicago, 1952, pp. 28 - 9.
There are just two ways of introducing terms into a system: (1) as primitives, (2) by definition. Passages in the Carnap article cited in Note 8 have given rise to the impression that there is a new, third, method of introducing terms: by reduction sentences. Carnap writes, for example, (p. 443): "If we wish to construct a language for science we have to take some descriptive (i.e. non-logical) terms as primitive terms. Further terms may then be introduced not only by explicit definitions but also by other reduction sentences. The possibility of introduction… by physical reduction is very important for science but so far not sufficiently noted in the logical analysis of science." This is rather misleading; for to introduce a term by means of reduction postulates is to introduce it as an ineliminable primitive.
The first of these hyphenated predicates will be defined as applying to all and only those things that either are under suitable pressure and bend, or are spectroscopically inspected and exhibit the pattern in question. The second hyphenated predicate will be defined as applying to all and only those things that either are under suitable pressure and fail to bend, or are spectroscopically inspected and fail to exhibit the pattern in question. (These formulations, like earlier passages in the above text, have been simplified by using ‘things’ not for long-enduring objects but for brief temporal segments of them.)
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Goodman, N. (1978). Counterfactuals and Dispositions. In: Tuomela, R. (eds) Dispositions. Synthese Library, vol 113. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1282-8_2
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