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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Travis Dumsday, "Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Description: Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say 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 salt. In Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Travis Dumsday articulates a novel version of dispositionalism – nomic dispositionalism – and considers its relation to a cross-section of fundamental debates and positions in the metaphysics of science, such as nature of scientific laws, the possibility of know...