Lewis's revised conditional analysis revisited

Eline Busck Gundersen

pp. 4541-4558

in: Cameron Buckner, Ellen Fridland (eds), Cognition, Synthese 194 (11), 2017.

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.

Cited authors

Lewis David