Dispositions, Bundles and Essences
Dispositions1 are usually thought to be properties of objects (e.g. Bird 1998, Molnar 2003, Vetter
2015, among many others). They are not free-floating properties. When they are instantiated, they
are instantiated by an object. This may appear as a platitude. Dispositionalists tend to have a conservatist
ontology composed of two categories : objects and properties. And the category of a objects
appears to be prior : the dispositions are constrained by their bearer. This latter grounds which
properties it may instantiate. Even when dispositionalists argue that dispositions play a fundamental
role, objects seems to be always the underlying basis. An important example is modal dispositionalism
(Borghini and Williams 2008, Jacobs 2010, Vetter 2015), i.e. the theory according to which metaphysical
modality is grounded on dispositions. According to this theory, dispositions play a fundamental
role, and yet, as Vetter (2021) argued, they are in turn constrained by the essence of their bearers.
Put in another way, an object cannot have a disposition which goes against its own essence. Socrates
cannot have the disposition to be turned into a sparrow. Objects are still the metaphysical basis.
In this talk, I argue that dispositionalists may endorse a different view, where dispositions are the
only fundamental category. I defend a bundle theory based on dispositions. If successful, this theory
would have important consequences concerning the relationship between dispositions, essences and de
re modality.
The talk is structured as follows. In section 2, I explore how dispositions might account for the
compresence of the properties compositing the bundle. This question is made complex by the fact that
bundle theories usually rely on a Humean metaphysics. My aim here is to account for the compresence
of properties by using a specific type of dispositions, structural dispositions, which glues them together
and constitutes thereby the object. But what are structural dispositions ? In section 3, I argue that
they are a special case of structural universals. I detail how they manifest and what type of unification
they provide. They appear to be polyadic second-order properties. In order to account for how they
work, and how they may build objects, I develop in section 4 a dispositional bundle theory based on
a higher-order language. This language enables me to precisely distinguish between different levels
of properties, which is crucial to our understanding of how structural dispositions work. However,
I consider a major objection to the theory in section 5 : if the properties which are in the bundle
are all necessary to generate the object, it would seem that a bundle cannot change its properties
without thereby becoming another bundle (cf. Van Cleve 1985). I argue that structural dispositions
only unifies properties which are constitutive of the object, and the theory is thus not subject to this
objection. Finally, this enables me to reconsider the relationship between dispositions and essences in
section 6 and argue that dispositions are the more fundamental. And more than that, it turns out that
this theory allows us to account for the possibility of non-existence, a de re possibility which modal
dispositionalists had trouble grounding (cf. Leech 2017) unlike essentialists.
1I take dispositions here to the the properties underlying dispositional predicates. Some authors prefer to use the
term ‘powers', but I use this more general term.
1
References
[1] Bird, A. (1998). Dispositions and Antidotes. The Philosophical Quarterly, 48, 227–234.
[2] Borghini, A., & Williams, N. E. (2008). A Dispositional Theory of Possibility. Dialectica, 62(1),
21–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.2007.01130.x
[3] Jacobs, J. D. (2010). A Powers Theory of Modality—Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Reject Possible Worlds. Philosophical Studies, 151, 227–248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-
9427-1
[4] Leech, J. (2017). Potentiality. Analysis, 77(2), 457–467. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anx047
[5] Molnar, G. (2003). Powers: A Study in Metaphysics (Issue 2). Oxford University Press.
[6] Van Cleve, J. (1985). Three Versions of the Bundle Theory. Philosophical Studies, 47(1), 95–107.
[7] Vetter, B. (2015). Potentiality: From dispositions to modality (First edition). Oxford University
Press.
[8] Vetter, B. (2021). Essence, Potentiality, and Modality. Mind, 130(519), 833–861. https://
doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzaa049