Disposition Impossible

C.S. Jenkins and Daniel Nolan Introduction A lot of our ordinary theorizing about the world is suffused with disposition talk, broadly construed. We classify things as fragile, explosive, poisonous, and so on. We talk freely of the capacities and abilities of things and people, and indeed we talk explicitly about dispositions (particularly of people) in everyday discourse. We will describe someone as having a friendly disposition, being well-disposed towards someone else, bring disposed to violent behaviour under certain circumstances, and so on. Theorizing in the sciences is also full of talk of dispositions, tendencies, propensities, and other phenomena that seem to be dispositional, or at least cousins of dispositional phenomena. Metals are malleable or ductile to different degrees, ecosystems are sometimes fragile, economies are sometimes prone to asset bubbles. If we were forbidden overnight to use any dispositional vocabulary, we would find it very difficult to do material science, ecology, or macroeconomics, to take just three examples, in anything like the way we ordinarily do.