Dispositional properties

It's a subject I've been seeing come up frequently in the literature I'm reading here of late. Por que, you ask? It's because I'm working up my intellectual chops to write kinda Heideggarianly about technology and astronomy.

Some of the work I've got before me currently involves the way information about the environment comes to be perceived by conscious creatures such as ourselves, either via our senses in direct observation, or as mediated by the technologies we use.

Dispositional properties are interesting in the sense (or, at least in one sense) that it makes perfect sense to talk about them existing even while the quality in question is not actualized. That might sound a little confusing, so let me refer to a common example: fragility.

It makes perfect sense to say this wine glass here IS fragile. But what does that mean? You might be tempted to answer: the glass's being fragile means it's breakable. But breakable is another dispositional property - the glass has the >capacity< or the ability to be broken, and saying it is break-able doesn't mean it has to actually BE broken. If it is broken, then its moment of fragility has kinda already passed, you know?

So for fragility: to say the glass IS fragile means that the glass >would< break WERE certain conditions met that don't actually obtain (e.g., that it would make forceful contact with a hard surface, were a dart be thrown at it, that it would be dropped, that it would be exposed to a person singing a note at just the right frequency, etc.). So talking about dispositional properties is interesting in one sense because it invokes subjunctive vocabulary, and questions about how to clearly work that out.

Back in the day when I was a phil science grad student, I read a mind-numbing quantity of logic-chopping analytic work which focused - as this brand of intellectualizing tends to do - on how to construct the right kinds of sentences capturing the truth about dispositional properties, either in symbolic logic or in everyday language. So for fragility, for instance, the analysis might go something like:

X is fragile {realizing condition 1} or {realizing condition 2} or {realizing condition 3} (and so on)

I know: exciting, right? And that's just the beginning of the fun. Because after someone might suggest up a way of parsing out such a schemata, the critical response begins: either about the content (such as, that the realizing conditions are insufficient), or about the logical form (say, shortcomings of using a string of disjunctions - I'll just leave that at that).

Nowadays I find it much more interesting to think about the metaphysics of dispositional properties - in what kind of space to they exist, if their very mode of being means that they (actually) exist in a potential state. What a peculiar sounding sort of existence! Scientists touch on something of this, on the topic of potential energy and kinetic energy. But don't let the fact that they have mathematics to describe the transformation from potential to kinetic imbue you with a sense that the mathematics gives an answer to their metaphysical strangeness.

How on earth does all that tie in with the perception of information from the environment? I'll sketch that out, as I am understanding it currently.

There is one way of thinking about information, or content, about the environment that goes: there is no information out there in the world in any rich, significant sense of the word. The information, or content, is supplied by conscious, perceiving creatures who receive sensory stimuli, and then process that stimuli through some kind of mental activity (relatively coarse or refined, depending on the creature). That processing is what adds the content or information. Content or information is a cognitive, or mental phenomenon - thus its occurrence must come as an addition by cognitive creatures. It cannot exist in a purely inert, unconscious, materialistic space - which contains all the non-mental stuff of the universe.

An alternative view I'm looking at now rejects the outlook in the paragraph above. It holds that the natural world is information-rich, and when we perceive the world, we perceive it with the information it provides. This information, on at least some accounts, exists in a dispositional state (aha! there's the tie-in, at last). It exists in a potential state, ready to be actualized upon the existence of a creature with a constitution to detect and make use of it.

Thus, to take a fairly primitive example, consider the quality or property of being edible. A thing's being edible is not a quality that is projected from a conscious creature onto the environment. Instead, being edible is a potential or latent quality in things themselves that, were a creature existing with a digestive system suitable to ingesting it, the quality would become manifest.

It's an interesting way to think about information in the universe, and it's a real joy to read about it in ways that do not turn the text into a logic book. Let's see what happens with this...