Kimpton-Nye Samuel
University of Bristol, Cotham House, Bristol, BS6 6JL UK.
Philos Stud. 2021;178(10):3421-3441. doi: 10.1007/s11098-021-01607-2. Epub 2021 Feb 3.
Dispositional Essentialism is a unified anti-Humean account of the metaphysics of low-level physical properties and laws of nature. In this paper, I articulate the view that I label (CDE), which comprises a structuralist metaphysics of properties and an account of laws as relations in the property structure. I then present an alternative anti-Humean account of properties and laws (still somewhat in the dispositional essentialist spirit). This account rejects CDE's structuralist metaphysics of properties in favour of a view of properties as qualitative grounds of dispositions and it rejects CDE's view of laws as relations in favour of a view of laws as features of an efficient description of possible property distributions. I then defend this view over CDE on the grounds that it can overcome an explanatory shortcoming of CDE and that it achieves a level of continuity with science that CDE fails to achieve. The upshot of this paper is a significant narrowing of the range of possibilities in which the best unified account of laws and properties resides.
倾向本质主义是对低层次物理属性和自然规律的形而上学的一种统一的反休谟式解释。在本文中，我阐述了一种我称之为（CDE）的观点，它包括一种属性的结构主义形而上学以及将规律视为属性结构中的关系的一种解释。然后我提出了一种关于属性和规律的替代性反休谟式解释（仍带有某种倾向本质主义的精神）。这种解释摒弃了CDE的属性结构主义形而上学，转而支持将属性视为倾向的质性基础的观点，并且它摒弃了CDE将规律视为关系的观点，转而支持将规律视为对可能的属性分布的有效描述的特征的观点。然后我基于它能够克服CDE的一个解释缺陷以及它实现了CDE未能实现的与科学的某种连续性这两点，为这种观点优于CDE进行辩护。本文的结果是，显著缩小了关于规律和属性的最佳统一解释所在的可能性范围。
