Jena 2013 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 1: Ontological Aspects in Physics

AGPhil 1.3: Vortrag

Montag, 25. Februar 2013, 15:00–15:30, SR 113

Natural Laws as Dispositions — •Florian Fischer — Königstr.3, 53113 Bonn

Dispositional theories of laws of nature are problematic, besides their popuarity. Reviewing the history of dispositions, I start with the simple conditional analysis. C.B. Martin pointed out that the conditions for gaining or loosing a disposition can be the same as the stimulus. Another closely related but significantly different group of counterexamples are Johnstons masks and Birds antidotes. The object keeps its disposition in these cases, but nevertheless the manifestation is somehow blocked or weakened.

There are a number of proposals how to save dispositions. I will present the accounts of Choi and Gunderson, Manley and Wasserman and finally Fara. In the end all of them are not convincing. My diagnosis is that all this accounts have something in common and that exactly this is the basic problem. They, somehow or other, narrow the scope of the disposition to exclude the counterexample cases, which is unaccapteble.

A look at the scientific practise can be of great help to examine a well-discussed case in the philosophical literature. To deal with the problems of the missing manifestation, I propose a new kind of manifestation. I conclude by comparing my view to recent accounts. I can make sense of abstraction and even answer the monotonicity charge. In the end, I would like to have removed one obstacle for a dispositional theory of laws of nature.