Barbara Vetter (2014), Mind 123(489): 129–156 — DOI-10.1093/mind/fzu032
Key takeaways
- A disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone, and its modality is a graded possibility, not a conditional: a fragile vase is one that can break easily, not one that would break if struck.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-125. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Dispositions are modal properties. The standard view individuates each disposition by a stimulus and a manifestation and captures its modality with a conditional, usually a counterfactual, from stimulus to manifestation. Vetter proposes instead that a disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone and that its modality is closest to possibility: fragility is being able to break easily. She develops the view in some detail and defends it against the main objections.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 10 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-125 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the founding statement of the possibility conception of dispositions (developed in Vetter’s Potentiality, OUP 2015); it is an agenda-setting proposal whose comparative case against the conditional conception is deferred to other work, and the reader should hold it to that.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-125, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — t=0 (not read). The skim captures the thesis of a well-known paper, and a deeper reading matters only if the record takes up the metaphysics of powers.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-125 is that reading):
- This is the foundational paper of Vetter’s potentiality programme (Potentiality, OUP 2015), and it matters for any metaphysics that grounds modality in powers.
- The graded-possibility semantics is the technical core. Check how “can easily M” is made precise, and whether it avoids the finkish and masking counterexamples that motivated conditional analyses.
- It is relevant wherever capabilities or dispositions of systems (including AI systems) are analysed modally.
Access when seeded: philarchive.org is behind Cloudflare. Read the full penultimate draft (PhilArchive VETDWC, 28 pp., “forthcoming in Mind”) through the Wayback Machine: the abstract, §1, the thesis statement in §2.1, the §§2–3 section heads, the end of §3.3 and the §4 conclusion. Crossref gives Mind online 2014-04-15 (issue 2014). Keywords are mine, since the draft lists none. Page numbers below are the draft’s.