Travis Dumsday, "Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
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What is the book and the main idea of dispositionalism introduced at the start?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdur, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Travis Dumsday, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University of Edmonton. His new book Dispositionalism and the metaphysics of science is just out from Cambridge University Press. Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do.
To say that salt is soluble in water, for example, is to say that salt has the disposition to dissolve in water, and this disposition is understood as a real causal power of the salt. In his new book, Dumstey articulates a novel version of dispositionalism, which he calls nomic. dispositionalism, and he considers its relation to a cross section of fundamental debates and positions in the metaphysics of science. These include the nature of scientific laws, the possibility of knowledge about unobservable entities, and whether there is any fundamental material stuff. So the book doubles as a concise and easily accessible introduction to many of the core debates in the metaphysics of science, as well as a defense of an intriguing new view of dispositionalism.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Travis. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hi,
Gary. Thanks very much.
So this is, you know, a great book. It it's it's a nice it's an excellent tour of the metaphysics of science besides being a defensive dispositionalism. So a lot of the you know, I'd say pretty much all of the basic issues that arise in the metaphysics of science on, you know, realism versus anti realism and material composition and causality. Um, I think the only one that's not directly I think addressed maybe reduction. Although you do talk about emergence, so that's also important. So it's um it's a it's an excellent review of a lot of these issues before you actually get into the the nitty gritty of defending a particular composition in some very unique and interesting ways. So before we begin to talk about particular topics um within the book, um maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to philosophy.
And how you came to write the book.
Sure. Well, um yeah, I sort of became obsessed with philosophy pretty early on when I was in high school in fact and so Professional trajectory was pretty clear from fairly early on. Um Oh yeah, I you know, I did my uh undergrad, you know, double major in philosophy and poly science.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the book and the main idea of dispositionalism introduced at the start?
0:00–9:44
2
How does Dumsday define a disposition and give the salt‑solubility example?
9:44–21:53
3
What are the three components (stimulus, manifestation, ceteris‑paribus) that identify a disposition?
21:53–33:05
4
How does nomic dispositionalism relate to the debate over scientific laws versus intrinsic powers?
33:05–49:15
5
Why does Dumsday argue that natural‑kind essentialism is crucial for grounding dispositions?
49:15–1:05:13
Speakers
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