Are Character Traits Dispositions?

Are Dispositions Reducible?

Although this definition is open to decisive objections, most of which are not new, NCA is not yet dead. There are still those of us who ask, on the presupposition that NCA or something very similar is the correct analysis of dispositions, whether dispositions can explain their manifestations, or whether the bearers of nothing but dispositional properties can fill space, or whether colours are ...

Are Dispositions Causally Relevant?

To determine whether dispositions are causally relevant, we have to get clear about what causal relevance is. Several characteristics of causal relevance have been suggested, including Explanatory Power, Counterfactual Dependence, Lawfulness, Exclusion, Independence, and Minimal Sufficiency. Different accounts will yield different answers about the causal relevance of dispositions. However, acc...

Skepticism about Character Traits

Sartre (1956) describes ways in which one may present oneself to others as being a certain sort of person. In one of his examples, a waiter presents himself as a waiter by as it were acting the part of a waiter. More generally, Sartre argues that, wanting to be, or at least to appear to others to be, a person of a certain sort or character, one often acts the part of a person of that sort of ch...

Internalization of Character Traits by Those Who Teach Character Counts!

Dispositions

Appeals to dispositionality in explanations of phenomena in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, require that we first agree on what we are talking about. I sketch an account of what dispositionality might be. That account will place me at odds with most current conceptions of dispositionality. My aim is not to establish a weighty ontological thesis, however, but to move the discussion ahead...