Abstract

There has been a movement in philosophy, growing over the last twenty years, to treat dispositionality as irreducible and, in turn, offer dispositional accounts of important metaphysical matters such as the laws of nature, free will, causation, and modality. However, unlike the earlier turn towards possible worlds in metaphysics, the turn towards dispositions hasn’t had much impact in semantics. But this is, in my view, largely because semanticists have yet to consider what dispositional analyses of (say) tense, aspect, generics, or modals would look like. My aim in this paper is to push the dispositionality movement forward on the semantics front by considering a dispositional analysis of the progressive aspect.

Highlights

  • There has been a movement in philosophy, growing over the last twenty years, to treat dispositionality as irreducible and, in turn, offer dispositional accounts of important metaphysical matters such as the laws of nature, free will, causation, and modality.1 unlike the earlier turn towards possible worlds in metaphysics, the turn towards dispositions hasn’t had much impact in semantics

  • The dispositional analysis offered can be regarded as a partitive analysis of the ­progressive

  • Some masks prevent the manifestation of a disposition by interrupting the manifestation process

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Summary

Nicky Kroll

There has been a movement in philosophy, growing over the last twenty years, to treat ­dispositionality as irreducible and, in turn, offer dispositional accounts of important ­metaphysical matters such as the laws of nature, free will, causation, and modality. Unlike the earlier turn towards possible worlds in metaphysics, the turn towards dispositions hasn’t had much impact in semantics. This is, in my view, largely because semanticists have yet to consider what dispositional analyses of (say) tense, aspect, generics, or modals would look like. My aim in this paper is to push the dispositionality movement forward on the semantics front by ­considering a dispositional analysis of the progressive aspect

Introduction
Concluding remarks

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