Philosophy, Department of

 

Date of this Version

2017

Citation

Published in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 10, edited by Karen Bennett and Dean W. Zimmerman (2017), pp 38–46.

Comments

Copyright © 2017 Jennifer McKitrick. Used by permission.

Abstract

In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll appeals to teleology to account for the way that dispositions seem to be directed toward their merely possible manifestations. He argues that his teleological account of dispositions (TAD) does a better job of making sense of this directedness than rival approaches that appeal to conditional statements or physical intentionality. In this short critique, I argue that, without satisfactory clarification of a number of issues, TAD does not adequately account for the directedness of dispositions. I focus on two aspects of TAD: the Activation Principle, and the proposed necessary and sufficient conditions for being a dispositional property.

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