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Lewis’s revised conditional analysis revisited

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Abstract

In ‘Finkish Dispositions’, David Lewis proposed a revised conditional analysis of dispositions, designed to rule out counterexamples based on finkish dispositions and finkish lacks of dispositions. Bird and Choi have argued that Lewis’s amended analysis is vulnerable to two further types of counterexamples trading on mimicked and masked dispositions. This paper provides a diagnosis of why Lewis’s analysis inherits these problems, and investigates whether the means can be found—in Lewis’s paper or elsewhere—to defend his analysis against the counterexamples. A range of strategies for defending conditional analyses against masking and mimicking counterexamples are assessed. The conclusion is that none of them will save Lewis’s analysis; some strategies fail, while the rest threaten to make Lewis’s amendments redundant. The discussion offers a number of general lessons about how (and how not) to defend conditional analyses of dispositions.

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Notes

  1. This formulation is from Lewis (1997, p. 143). It does not accommodate dispositions that are not associated with a particular stimulus, such as radioactive decay, but is usually treated as standard and will serve our purposes. (See Vetter (2014) for a (non-conditional) account that accommodates dispositions with no associated stimulus.)

  2. Martin (1994) is usually credited with the (belatedly published) invention of counterexamples based on finkish dispositions and finkish lacks of dispositions. Shope (1978) discusses analogous counterexamples to conditional analyses in several areas.

  3. This traditional way of formulating the counterexamples may be questioned in various ways. For example, some might argue that it is not mandatory to view the sorcerer-protected vase as fragile, given McKitrick’s (2003) point that fragility does not depend on intrinsic nature alone. We shall discuss such objections in Sect. 10.

  4. Lewis’s analysis will be of limited applicability if there are baseless dispositions. But this may not be a problem, as the intuitive power of finkish counterexamples may depend entirely on intuitions about changes of bases. (Thanks to Crispin Wright for discussion of this issue.) Lewis remains neutral on whether dispositions should be identified with their bases or thought of as the second order properties of having certain base properties, and on whether or not the bases should be thought of as categorical properties (1997, pp. 151–152).

  5. Lewis discusses the antidote example (1997, p. 153), but thinks it can be accommodated for reasons discussed in Sects. 5 and 9.

  6. This diagnosis builds on similar materials as Bird’s masking counterexamples and his general thoughts around them, but the emphasis on why Lewis’s revisions do not make a difference with respect to masking is mine.

  7. Ashwell (2010) and Everett (2009) argue for the possibility of internal maskers. If they are right (which is a matter of heated dispute), this is consistent with my point; all that is needed for present purposes is that some masking cases are due to external factors. More on internal maskers in fn. 26.

  8. Lewis (1997, pp. 152–153) is aware of this challenge and has views on how to meet it; see Sect. 5.

  9. But this time with an important exception: a mimicking counterexample to Lewis’s analysis depends on the availability of a suitable B-property. In Sect. 4, we consider whether mimicking counterexamples can be ruled out by restrictions on the range of suitable B-properties or their connection with the stimulus.

  10. As emphasized in Busck Gundersen (2010).

  11. A defence strategy that denies the reality of masking, and hence the points of this section, is discussed in Sect. 10. I owe thanks to Crispin Wright for suggestions and discussion on the main points of this section, and to an anonymous reviewer for emphasising their importance.

  12. Bird discusses the following defences: refined specifications of stimulus and response (1998, p. 231; Sects. 6–7); adding a ‘nothing extrinsic prevents the response’-clause (pp. 232–233; Sect. 8); and redescribing masking cases as finkish cases (pp. 229–230; Sect. 10). See Choi (2003) for a criticism of Bird’s arguments and discussion of a further defence strategy (Sect. 9).

  13. Mumford (1996) disagrees, and argues that masking cases can be handled, whereas mimicking cases can not.

  14. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for questioning the permissibility of the causal distance between B and r in the Styrofoam example.

  15. Of course, there are limits to how complex such a process can be. Those limits are set by pragmatics; dispositional concepts arise where there is a pattern sufficiently simple and sufficiently important to serve as a basis for fairly consistent disposition ascriptions. If there is a plausible way to restrict the complexity permissible for the causal connection between B and r (doubtful, but who knows what smart philosophers can achieve?), perhaps this could save Lewis’s analysis from mimicking counterexamples. But it is hard to see how a parallel move could rule out masking counterexamples, so it would leave the rest of our discussion untouched.

  16. Lewis (1997, p.154). But see Choi (2005, p. 186; 2008, p. 825 ff); more on Choi’s defences in Sects. 8 and 9.

  17. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this.

  18. Lewis discusses this issue on pp. 151–152. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting mention of it here.

  19. Choi (2008, p. 814). This approach is reminiscent of Pettit’s (1999) approach to the ‘favourable conditions’ employed in response-dependence theses. In both cases, appealing to conceptual practices seems the only promising way to give a specification of normal conditions that is substantial, yet flexible enough to avoid falsifying the relevant equations.

  20. The latter strategy was brought to my attention by Crispin Wright. It has affinities with the approach taken by Gundersen (2004) and Bonevac et al. (2006); see Sect. 11.

  21. One challenge concerns counterexamples of Manley and Wasserman’s (2008) ‘Achilles’s heels’ and ’reverse Achilles’s heels’ varieties. These exploit the possibility of unusual instances even in the best of conditions—e.g. that one fragile glass in a thousand will survive a normally fatal fall. If exceptional instances can occur even under ordinary conditions (or within the sphere of accessibility relevant for the conditional), this threatens the general claims made in the conditional analysans about how the object would respond in ordinary conditions (the truth of the counterfactual requires that all antecedent-cases (dropping-cases) within the sphere of accessibility are consequent-cases (breaking-cases, or having-a-B-that-would-join-with-dropping-to-cause-breaking-cases)). The ‘improved conditionals’ approach (Sect. 11) is prima facie the approach best placed to deal with counterexamples of these types. A second challenge concerns counterexamples involving disposition changes triggered by ordinary conditions’ coming to obtain. See Busck Gundersen (2013) for a discussion of analogous problems for response-dependence theses and various candidate solutions.

  22. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helpful suggestions.

  23. (Lewis 1973, p. 567, fn. 12.). The claim is made about symmetrical cases of over-determination in the context of presenting an account of causation.

  24. Blackburn (1993) considers such dispositions.

  25. Some might object that a fink, for Lewis, is something that alters the intrinsic nature of an object under certain stimuli, but that the fail-safe mechanism cannot be correctly described as a fink in this sense, since it does not change the intrinsic nature of uranium (how could it?) or of the system of uranium + boron rods. I am inclined to think that it does change the intrinsic nature of the system it is a finkish disposition of—the system consisting of the uranium pile and the boron rods—since it changes the configuration of molecules of that system. However that may be, let us grant for the sake of the argument that the fail-safe mechanism can be understood as a fink, and investigate whether the strategy can succeed if given the benefit of the doubt. If it can’t, the overall dialectics will be untouched by the objection. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for stating it.

  26. The second horn of Gundersen’s dilemma might come under attack from recent examples of internal finks and maskers (Clarke 2008; Ashwell 2010; Everett 2009). However, Gundersen’s (2004) normality-based semantics for the conditionals can address this problem.

       Is the possibility of internal maskers and finks a problem for Lewis, given his focus on intrinsic features of the object? Probably not. Lewis acknowledges as a ‘surprising, but unobjectionable, consequence’ of his analysis that an object may be oppositely disposed, as long as one of the dispositions is finkish (1997, p. 157). (He can get away with that because the main connective of his analysans is an existential quantifier rather than a counterfactual.) The alleged possibility of internal maskers does, however, pose a problem for Choi’s (2008) account of ordinary conditions, as this focuses on extrinsic conditions and thus does not rule out maskers that are not triggered by external influences. Choi (2013) responds by rejecting the possibility of internal finks and maskers.

  27. If Gundersen’s anti-masking strategy (2002) depends on his revisions of the Lewis/Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals (2004, see Sect. 11), it would be a surprising bedfellow for Lewis’s analysis. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.) Gundersen maintains (in private correspondence) that there is no such dependence.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Lars Bo Gundersen and Crispin Wright for many illuminating exchanges of views on dispositions and conditional fallacy problems, and to them, Katherine Hawley, and the Reflective Mind group at the University of Oslo - Nick Allott, Timothy Chan and Anders Nes - for feedback on drafts. I am grateful to anonymous reviewers for Synthese for insightful comment that led to vast improvements, and for helpful feedback from audiences at the Universities of Aarhus, Bielefeld, Canterbury, St. Andrews, and CUNY on (distant) ancestors of this paper.

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    Eline Busck Gundersen

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Busck Gundersen, E. Lewis’s revised conditional analysis revisited. Synthese 194, 4541–4558 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1151-8

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