Against causal efficacy of dispositions

Abstract

The present thesis is an investigation of dispositional properties and their manifestations as a way to give causal explanations in sciences. According to Stephen Mumford, even though by appealing to dispositional explanations we can give information already possessed, this fact doesn’t preclude dispositional properties’ being causes of their manifestations. This study is an endeavour to show that dispositional properties are epiphenomenal second order properties compared to the first order structural properties. The views of various physicists and philosphers sustain this view of mine. My main goal has been to show that such teleological approaches (like Mumford’s) are insufficient in accounting for natural phenomena and their relations. Thus I tried to compare and contrast dispositional explanations with structural explanations.