Finkish Dispositions and Contextualism

Abstract

Martin's famous examples of dispositional finks have been at the centre of philosophical discussions regarding the semantical and metaphysical nature of dispositions for decades. Thanks to the works by many philosophers like David Lewis, we have learned numerous insights about dispositions from Martin's examples. I take it, though, that there are more morals yet to be learned from Martin's examples. In this paper, I will draw from them one important moral about the contextual contribution to the semantic values of dispositional ascriptions. I will first articulate what I mean by the context-sensitivity of dispo sitional ascriptions. It is old news that it is possible that two people disagree about whether or not x has disposition D but they both are intuitively correct. A homemaker truly asserts that a television set is not fragile, whilst a building worker truly asserts that the same television set is fragile. There thus seem to be two true dispositional ascriptions that appear to be mutually in compatible. The most common and compelling account of this phenomenon is to invoke the idea that the semantic value of a dispositional ascription at least in part depends on the context in which the ascription is made. In this regard, Hawthorne and Manley's distinction between envi ronment-dependence and ascriber-dependence is illuminating. The idea of environment-dependence is that the semantic value of a dispositional as cription to x is partly determined by x's current environment. Suppose, for instance, that at home a soft blow is common and at a construction site a very hard blow is common. Then when something is currently at home, what we mean by saying simply that it is fragile is that it is fragile for a soft blow. Meanwhile, when something is currently at a construction site, by saying simply that it is fragile we mean that it is fragile for a very hard blow. In this sense, the truth-value of 'x is fragile' depends on x's current environment.