“The Non-identity of the Categorical and the Dispositional” David S. Oderberg
Analysis, Volume 69, Number 4 (October 2009), pages 677-684.
Main authors discussed: David Oderberg, Galen Strawson, Alexander Bird, Mark Heller
Oderberg’s article is a response to Galen Strawson’s “The identity of the categorical and the dispositional” (reviewed previously). Strawson, following Descartes, assumes that a real distinction between x and y entails that x and y can exist separately. Since dispositional properties cannot exist separately from categorical properties, Strawson concludes that there is no real distinction between them. Thus, what grounds their inseparability is, he claims, identity.
Following Aquinas rather than Descartes, Oderberg maintains that the presupposition of Strawson’s argument is in error. Real distinction does not entail separable existence, as can be seen by considering a circle’s properties of having a radius and having a circumference, between which there is clearly a real distinction even though neither property can exist apart from the other. What grounds their inseparability is therefore not identity, but rather the essence of a circle. In general, where x and y are really distinct but inseparable features of a thing, it is essence (either the essences of x and y themselves or of the thing to which they belong) rather than identity that explains their inseparability.
Like Strawson, Oderberg thinks the terminology used in contemporary debate over these issues is unsatisfactory. Oderberg recommends the traditional language of actuality and potency as less misleading than modern talk of the categorical versus the dispositional. Strawson holds, in effect, that all being is actual being. But in Oderberg’s view, the one example Strawson gives of what is actual – ‘energy whose nature can be positively characterized by us only in terms of what effects it has’ – in fact tells against his thesis. For it is precisely potential energy that can be ‘characterized by us only in terms of what effects it has’ – specifically, Oderberg tells us, ‘in terms of the kinetic energy into which it can be but is not actually converted.’ The example thus points to the reality of that which has being even though it is non-actual – that is to say, to what exists as a potency or potential. And while Strawson is right to hold that potency entails actuality, it doesn’t follow that potency is actuality.
Oderberg also objects to Strawson’s claim that there is no distinction between an object and its ‘propertiedness.’ If this were true, Oderberg argues, then there would be no way to explain how property instances or tropes are individuated. It would also become hard to explain how an object’s properties might have been different from what they are while it remained the same object. Strawson’s reply to this difficulty seems to presuppose either: (a) that an object consists of all of its properties throughout its existence – which cannot be right since some of these properties are contrary or contradictory (and time-indexing these properties would entail denying the existence of any intrinsic properties, which Strawson himself would not do); or (b) temporal parts theory – which, Oderberg argues, leads to similarly problematic results.
Reviewed by Edward Feser
Pasadena City College
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