Abstract
Inspired both by our ordinary understanding of the world and by reflection on science, anti-Humeanism is a growing trend in metaphysics. Anti-Humeans reject the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience that the world is “just one little thing and then another”, and argue instead that dispositions, powers, or capacities provide connection and (some say) activity in nature. But how exactly are we to understand the shared commitment of this anti-Humean movement? I argue that this kind of anti-Humeanism, at its most general level, is to be understood neither as a view about ontology (the existence of certain properties) nor about fundamentality, but rather as a specific claim about what explains what.
Highlights
What is metaphysics all about? According to the Quinean tradition, metaphysics is basically ontology, a matter of answering the question ‘what there is’ (and, in the second instance, how things are; see Janssen-Lauret (2017, p. 6)
The world of Humean metaphysics is, at bottom, devoid of laws which connect and govern the different happenings in the world, leaving it a mystery why things behave in lawful ways (Bird 2007); it is devoid of any kind of genuine modality, which as a consequence is ‘outsourced’ to other possible worlds that are barren (Vetter 2011); and it is devoid of real causation, of dispositions, and powers, all of which must be tenuously reconstructed, losing much of their ‘oomph’ in the process
The label ‘anti-Humeanism’ is taken to refer to a more specific positive view, one which takes Aristotle rather than Hume as its philosophical hero and is characterized by appeal to properties that are variously called powers, potencies, potentialities, or dispositions. It is anti-Humeanism in this narrow sense, sometimes called dispositionalism, that will be my concern in this paper
Summary
What is metaphysics all about? According to the Quinean tradition (most prominently, Quine 1948), metaphysics is basically ontology, a matter of answering the question ‘what there is’ (and, in the second instance, how things are; see Janssen-Lauret (2017, p. 6). The world of Humean metaphysics is, at bottom, devoid of laws which connect and govern the different happenings in the world, leaving it a mystery why things behave in lawful ways (Bird 2007); it is devoid of any kind of genuine modality, which as a consequence is ‘outsourced’ to other possible worlds that are barren (Vetter 2011); and it is devoid of real causation, of dispositions, and powers, all of which must be tenuously reconstructed, losing much of their ‘oomph’ in the process Such a view of the world, according to anti-Humeans, does justice neither to the manifest image of the world, which is replete with tendencies and powers, causes and possibilities, nor to the scientific image. The label ‘anti-Humeanism’ is taken to refer to a more specific positive view, one which takes Aristotle rather than Hume as its philosophical hero and is characterized by appeal to properties that are variously called powers, potencies, potentialities, or dispositions It is anti-Humeanism in this narrow sense, sometimes called dispositionalism, that will be my concern in this paper. I will formulate a minimal version of this view, which I take to encapsulate the shared core commitment of anti-Humean metaphysics, and indicate ways in which it can be strengthened to yield different versions of the view
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