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Smith On ‘Dispositions’
... (See, for example, Smith [33]. Prior [30], by contrast, claims to solve the problem by treating dispositional properties as incomplete predicates; however that solution cannot be considered a preservation of supervenience.) The proposal is to save covariation of macro with micro by weakening it-with enlargement of the supervenience base to include characteristics or conditions pertaining to environment. ...
... 29 As long as they maintain the judgment that C is a macroquantity, and do not suddenly change to judging it a microquantity. 30 The argument I will use against taking the supervenience proposal as necessarily true will be just as effective against taking it as necessarily false, so I will not consider that possibility here. The primary reason, I believe, for recognizing (3) as a possibility in these important instances is that we ought to be suspicious of a real demarcation in nature between microscopic and macroscopic. ...
This paper argues that the doctrines of determinism and supervenience, while logically independent, are importantly linked in physical mechanics-and quite interestingly so. For it is possible to formulate classical mechanics in such a way as to take advantage of the existence of mathematical devices that represent the advance of time-and which are such as to inspire confidence in the truth of determinism-in order to prevent viola- tion of supervenience. It is also possible to formulate classical mechanics-and to do so in an observationally equivalent, and thus equally empirically respectable, way-such that violations of supervenience are (on the one hand) routine, and (on the other hand) necessary for achieving complete descriptions of the motions of mechanical systems- necessary, therefore, for achieving a deterministic mechanical theory. Two such formulations-only one of which preserves supervenience universally-will conceive of mechanical law in quite different ways. What's more, they will not admit of being extended to treat thermodynamical questions in the same way. Thus we will find that supervenience is a contingent matter, in the following rather surprising and philosoph- ically interesting way: we cannot in mechanics separate our decisions to conceive of physical law in certain ways from our decisions to treat macroscopic quantities in certain ways.
L'A. souligne l'incoherence du monisme categorial des proprietes de Quine et rejette la conception ontologique du monisme dispositionnel des proprietes de Popper, qui affirment tous deux l'identite des proprietes categoriales et des proprietes dispositionnelles d'une classe en vertu du processus de reduction ontologique de cette classe a une autre, qui souleve le probleme de la survenance definie comme relation de dependance d'une classe superordonnee a une classe subordonnee
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