Abstract
As usually presented the thesis that a belief is a disposition to act1 has two virtues and three defects. It is a clear improvement over the Humean thesis that a belief is a lively idea, and it appears to be of considerable relevance for psychological doctrine and theories of rational inference.2 Unfortunately, there is the debit side. ‘Disposition to’ is not always clearly explicated, nor is the philosophical problem which the thesis is intended to solve always explicit. And when it is, concomitant philosophical gain seems slight. But despite these ills the thesis calls not for abandonment but for reinterpretation which we shall attempt to supply after we document our complaints and indicate what we take to be legitimate sources of puzzlement and the ways of their removal.
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Notes
We mean to consider both dispositions to action and dispositions to behavior but shall not attempt, except in passing, to offer a way to distinguish them. For our purpose, a precise distinction is not essential, although we shall often follow the traditional but nebulous view that behavior consists only of bodily motions whereas action is explainable in terms of the goal directed character of such motions. This distinction may be allowed as a first approximation sufficient for the purposes at hand.
Thus, if the ‘conclusion’ of an inference is the acquisition of a certain disposition to act, a theory of rational inference is an organon designed for the pursuit of practical wisdom. Rational belief becomes a function of the factors controlling rational action. Whether this implication holds for all conceivable analyses of belief as disposition to action is debatable. It does seem to hold, however, for the typical views currently held.
The distinction between occurrent and non-occurrent terms is not always drawn in a uniform way. It may contrast between: (a) terms applying to entities localizable in time (or space and time) and those which do not so apply; (b) terms which apply to entities in time (or space and time) for only brief periods and those which do not; (c) terms which describe changes in the conditions of objects to which they apply and those which do not (‘becomes red’ vs. ‘is red’); (d) terms which describe evanescent changes and those which do not (‘flashes’ vs. ‘beams’). Since disposition terms are usually occurrent in sense (a) and may be so in sense (b) (an iron bar may be magnetic for a brief period) and since most authors treat disposition terms as non-occurrent, we shall usually take the distinction in sense (c) or (d) without distinguishing between them.
None the less, we may conclude that analyses of beliefs as dispositions to action are concerned with belief in the non-occurrent sense. We shall, therefore, restrict our discussion to that sense.
R. B. Braithwaite, ‘The Nature of Believing,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 33 (1932-33), pp. 129-146, and ‘Belief and Action,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 20 (1946), pp. 1-19.
‘Belief and Action,’ p. 7. Presumably dispositions to act are dispositions to goal directed behavior in a sense akin either to Bigelow-Rosenblueth-Wiener or Braithwaite-NagelSommerhof which allegedly does not introduce intentionality through the back door.
I. Sheffler, ‘Thought on Teleology,’ The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 9 (1959), pp. 280-281.
Ibid., p. 283.
The difficulties raised here concern the implications of Braithwaite’s analysis for theories of rational belief and inference (see note 2). Consequently, the thrust of our comments is independent of the attempt to eliminate intentionality and should be felt by analyses similar to Braithwaite’s regardless of the purposes to which they are nut.
Braithwaite, op. cit., p. 10-11. The springs of action are “the intentions, desires, wants, motives, instinctive needs, drives of the believer at the time when an external occasion for the appropriate action arises.” (Ibid.,p. 9). Braithwaite takes the springs of action to be internal states and events which are causes or part-causes of human behavior. He, therefore, stands in opposition to Ryle who uses dispositional analyses of belief and motive predicates as a means of avoiding reference to internal states and occurrences. We shall argue later that Ryle’s procedure leads to circularities which Braithwaite’s analysis avoids.
Testing the thesis in this manner is obviously not unfair, though Braithwaite restricts his analysis to the notion of sincere belief, leaving open the question of the rationality of the belief.
R. C. Jeffrey, ‘Valuation and Acceptance of Scientific Hypotheses,’ Philosophy of Science 23 (1956), p. 242. Our analysis differs from Jeffrey’s.
We should like to be able to say ‘any contingent proposition’ but are aware of the difficulty of interpreting the concept of a bet on the truth value of some types of contingent propositions most notably universal generalizations. However, we feel that Braithwaite’s analysis falters on such propositions anyway.
G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York, 1949), p. 90 [Chapter V reprinted above, pp. 339-357].
Ibid., p. 117.
Carnap mentions two possible rules for introducing dispositional predicates in terms of hypotheticals involving ‘stimulus’ and ‘response’ conditions. (‘Stimulus’ and ‘response’ are to be understood to be antecedent and consequent conditions generally and not in a more narrowly psychological sense.) One is via reduction sentences; the other is via explicit definition in terms of hypotheticals involving causal modalities. R. Carnap, ‘The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts,’ Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. I (Minneapolis, 1956), pp. 63-64. Ryle’s account follows, roughly speaking, the second alternative.
Carnap has virtually admitted that his account of disposition terms violates presystematic usage by baptizing terms like “reflector of electromagnetic waves,” “theoretical disposition terms” (Ibid., pp. 66-67).
Carnap distinguishes pure dispositional predicates from theoretical terms by imposing the following requirement on terms of the first kind: “If S (stimulus) holds for b, but R (response) does not, then b cannot have the disposition.” (ibid., p. 67). It should be noted in passing that this requirement would seem to reduce virtually every non-observational term to theoretical status; for the hypotheticals relating S and R terms will, in general, prove satisfactory only if they contain ‘ceteris paribus’ clauses and this entails violation of the requirement for pure dispositional status.
Ibid., pp. 71-73. Carnap does not discuss beliefs and emotions directly but his point can be extrapolated to this case very easily.
Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 44 [cf. above, pp. 17-26].
Ibid., p. 45.
Loc. cit.
Ibid.,pp. 44-45.
Goodman’s concept formational problem is not to specify conditions of applicability of non-observational terms in some observation language. He is concerned to specify conditions of applicability of non-occurrent terms in an occurrent language. It should be noted, however, that Goodman, like Ryle, does not always distinguish clearly between the two problems.
It is not clear whether Goodman wants to say that the threats and promises infect only non-occurrent terms. If he did, he would be mistaken. If ‘is magnetic’ is full of threats and promises so is the occurrent, ‘becomes magnetic.’ Similarly with ‘is red’ and ‘becomes red.’ Goodman admits that many prima facie occurrent terms speak of what can happen (although his reasons are different from that just cited) and concludes that the distinction between what is occurrent (i.e., manifest) and what is dispositional is context dependent (p. 59, footnote 7). But even if we concede this, some occurrent terms will be full of threats and promises; for, once again, if ‘is magnetic’ is full of threats and promises in a given context, so is ‘becomes magnetic.’ This suggests that Goodman’s program for solving the threats and promises mystery by specifying conditions of applicability of disposition predicates in terms of manifest (i.e., occurrent) predicates need not necessarily solve the problem.
Evidence for this interpretation of Ryle can be found in his persistent conflation of the dispositional/non-dispositional dichotomy with the non-occurrent/occurrent dichotomy. See G. Ryle, op. cit., especially pp. 116-117. Note the title of chap. 5, ‘Dispositions and Occurrences’ [reprinted above, pp. 339-357].
Op. cit., pp. 17-24.
This point applies to Goodman also. According to Goodman, we can make a beginning toward replacing disposition terms with manifest predicates in a manner illustrated by the replacement of ‘flexible’ by ‘flexible-under-suitable-pressure-or-spectroscopic-inspection.’ This term applies to things that are either under suitable pressure and bend or are spectroscopically inspected. But what is suitable pressure? It must be pressure under suitable conditions including non-occurrent conditions. Goodman cannot escape this result by taking the hyphenated term as a single predicate; for even if, in some sense, it is occurrent, it is, like ‘becomes magnetic’ full of threats and promises. (See footnote 25.) In all fairness to Goodman, it should be observed that the individuals in his discussion are not “long enduring objects but brief temporal segments of them.” (p. 60, footnote 12.). It is not clear how Goodman means to distinguish manifest from dispositional predicates for such entities.
This difficulty can be avoided by treating the pertinent distinctions as context dependent. We do not object to context dependent distinctions. But surely some indication must be given of those features of a context which determine how a given distinction is to be made in that context. From clues in the writings of both Goodman and Ryle, we suspect but cannot prove that there distinctions between dispositional and occurrent or dispositional and manifest predicates are determined by context in the same way (whatever that may be) in which distinctions between observational and non-observational terms are determined. We have already had our say about the relevance of such distinctions to dispositional analyses.
By ‘sufficient conditions’ we mean only that a statement of tie following sort is true: Whenever anyone has beliefs B, motives M in environment E, and is subject to stimulus S,he performs act A. It is doubtful whether we know any such statements to be true-certainly not without a ceteris paribus clause. But we shall conduct this discussion with the same simplifying assumptions that dispositional analysts allow themselves.
Ryle, op. cit., pp. 123-124 and C. G. Hempel and P. Oppenheim, ‘The Logic of Scientific Explanation,’ reprinted in H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck, Readings in Philosophy of Science, pp. 343-344. Alan Donagan in ‘Explanation in History’ (reprinted in P. Gardiner, Theories of History, pp. 428-443), contends that Rylean explanations differ ‘from anything recognized in Hempelian theory .. ’ (p. 435). Ryle’s law-like statements are exactly what Hempel and Oppenheim term essentially but not purely generalized statements, i.e., general statements which are not equivalent to singular statements but which contain individual constants. (The claim that they are not singular statements must, of course, be relativized to the set of predicates considered primitive within the context under scrutiny. Relative to such predicates, a singular statement is one which contains no variables). There is, indeed, a difference between Ryle and Hempel-Oppenheim. According to Ryle, law-like statements can be used in legitimate explanations even when they are not derived from purely generalized statements.
Ryle, op. cit., pp. 113-114.
Ryle quite correctly takes the relation to obtain between events or occurrents.
Op. cit., pp. 119-120. We have already noted that Goodman also construes dispositionality to be problematic or mystery-raising. We feel, however, that he (and Ryle when he talks this way) fail to identify the mystery.
W V. Quine, Word and Object (New York, Technology Press and Wiley, 1960), p. 225.
The commitment to look for the same standing conditions in all contexts in which a given disposition term is used may be abandoned without abandoning the use of the disposition term in all these contexts. If we have good evidence to the contrary, we need not suppose that ‘fragile’ is to be replaced by the same specification of standing conditions in every context in which ‘fragile’ is used as a place holder. However, the use of the same disposition term in explanations of different phenomena does involve a prima facie commitment to look for the same or similar standing conditions.
We do not mean to require that disposition terms be replaced by specifications of micro-structure. The type of characterization of standing condition which is suitable as a replacement of a disposition term depends on context in the sense indicated in the next paragraph and footnote 38.
Thus, we agree with both Goodman and Quine that the distinction between dispositional and non-dispositional terms is context dependent but disagree with both of them as to how the context determines the distinction. According to Goodman the distinction is relative to the basic language of occurrences; according to Quine, a predicate is dispositional relative to what it is dispositional to; according to our proposal, it is relative to the set of predicates which can be used to specify a legitimate replacement of the disposition predicate qua place-holder.
C. D. Broad, Mind and Its Place in Nature (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1925), pp. 430-440; C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 46-53.
Broad, op. cit., pp. 433-435.
Ibid., p. 440. Broad did not maintain that physics could eliminate all dispositions (“causal characteristics”) by micro-reduction. To characterize the microentities as obeying certain laws is, so Broad contended, to ascribe to them certain causal properties. If these laws are purely and essentially general, we do not feel that any purpose is served in talking of the entities obeying them having a disposition. According to our ‘place-holder view’ the point of introducing disposition predicates is to reduce the extendability of explanations. When the available laws provide us with non-extendable explanations, there is no reason for talking of a disposition to obey these laws. Of course, we are not saying that micro-entities must lack dispositions. We may not have purely and essentially general laws expressed with theoretically impeccable predicates. Moreover, what counts as purely and essentially general depends on the range of our individual variables.
Loc. cit.
We may in a certain sense explain why a metal ring did not regain its shape after it was squeezed by reference to its loss of elasticity. But the context in which such explanations occur is one where it was initially assumed that the ring was elastic and that it would regain its shape. Our request for an explanation is, in this case, a request for the removal of an inconsistency. The reference to loss of elasticity is not, therefore, to be construed as a specification of a causal factor but as an indication of the way in which the inconsistency is to be removed.
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Levi, I., Morgenbesser, S. (1978). Belief and Disposition. In: Tuomela, R. (eds) Dispositions. Synthese Library, vol 113. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1282-8_21
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