#WhatTendsToBe

Dispositional Modality

“Today's special: the #WhatTendsToBe book by #TeamMumJum, first available in tweets. 10 essays on the dispositional modality.”

https://twitter.com/ranilillanjum/status/928615881298542597

Ch 1: There's a worldly, de re modality, stronger than pure contingency but short of necessity: irreducible tendencies. It's everywhere.

Ch 2: Historically, many philosophers speak of tendencies, but they usually just mean necessity, or at best conditional necessity.

Ch 3: Tendencies are not simply probabilistic, where the strength of a tendencies is given by the proportion of successful outcomes.

Ch 4: Causation has been dismissed from the Q realm, but on the misconception that causation involves necessity & determinism.

Ch 5: Dispositions are basic & cannot be reductively analysed into conditionals. Extensional logic has a metaphysical Humean bias.

Ch 6: Conditional probability should be given an ontological dispositional reading, widely different from the logical ratio definition.

Ch 7: Perception is neither subjective or objective, but the result of genuine causal interaction between a perceiver & the perceived.

Ch 8: Causal inferences are always fallible & subject to the problem of induction, because of their irreducibly tendential nature.

Ch 9: Ethics, value, normativity & agency should all be understood dispositionally, moving beyond the old fact/value dichotomy.

Ch 10: Tendencies explains how we can have free agency without necessity (no alternative possibility) or chance (no authorship).