Fisk on Capacities and Natures Bruce Aune PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol. 1970. (1970), pp. 83-87. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0270-8647%281970%291970%3C83%3AFOCAN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.
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http://www.jstor.org Fri Jun 22 07:20:09 2007
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FISK O N CAPACITIES A N D NATURES
Fisk begins his discussion by asserting, that the FS model attempts to complete the SR model by accounting for the necessity with which, according to the SR model, a capacity will be exercised when certain operations are performed. He argues that the FS model ultimately fails in this task, and he seeks to improve upon the FS approach by grounding the relevant necessity in an entity's nature - a component that defenders of the FS model ignore or misinterpret. For the most part my comments will concern the general strategy of his paper rather than details of the arguments he offers. Since the major focus of Fisk's paper is on the necessity with which, according to his description of the SR model, a capacity is exercised under certain conditions, it is worth emphasizing that this idea is pretty implausible. To have a capacity to do something is only to be capable of doing it. But although doing what one is capable of doing may be granted to result from some cause, it is far from clear that the cause can always (or even generally) be specified in 'operational' terms. Unlike an owl or cat, I am capable of laughing; yet it is extremely doubtful whether there is a specific condition describable in operational terms that would necessitate my laughter. The significance of this point is at least twofold. First, the SR model as described by Fisk has at best a very limited applicability; an operationalist can't expect to discover as many (physically) necessary conditionals as he might believe. Second, a basic motive for adopting the FS model is not to account for necessary SR conditionals but to express one's belief that there are specific conditions (of fine structure) which account for the fact that capacities are regularly exercised by certain kinds of things and materials under fairly specific conditions - these conditions often being most reliably identified by reference to fine structure. Thus, to make sure that the liquid in which you are trying to dissolve a certain material is a good sample of the kind of liquid you want, it will often be wise to have some of it analyzed by a competent chemist. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, VIII. All rights reserved.
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I have other reasons for doubting that proponents of the FS model have the aim Fisk credits them with - that is, the aim of accounting for the necessity of SR conditionals. For one thing, some of the best known defenders of the model do not seem to have this aim. Quine, for example, accepts the FS model, but his aim is apparently to avoid familiar problems with subjunctive (particularly, counterfactual) conditiona1s.l If I undetstand him correctly, he would not grant that the SR model affirms a necessity thatdeservesto be accounted for. For another thing, the FS model does not specify a property of fine structure that even appears to account for an SR necessity. It merely asserts that there is some property or other of fine structure that, when known, would account for the truth of an SR conditional. And this is no explanation; at most it is an expression of the belief that an appropriate explanation can be found - when we learn more about fine structure. All this is not to deny an important point that Fisk in effect emphasizes - namely, that the FS approach is patently inadequate as a general treatment of capacities. Few philosophers would deny that the world is built up from fundamental entities, though they might well deny that we are currently able to identify them. But these fundamental entities, which as fundamental lack fine structure, have capacities as well as dispositions. The most the FS approach can do, therefore, is to point toward a FS explanation of the capacities of nonfundamental entities. It can have nothing useful to say about the capacities of fundamental entities and therefore nothing useful to say about capacities generally. Although (if I am right) proponents of the FS model are not specifically concerned to account for the necessity of SR conditionals, they certainly believe that at least the regularities affirmed by some of these conditionals can in principle be explained by reference to the fine structure of the entities concerned. Since, however, an entity's fine structure is ultimately to be understood in terms of the lawful behavior of fundamental entities, proponents of the model cannot hope for more than an explanation of one regularity by reference to other, more fundamental regularities. Does this not show that they cannot ultimately account even for the regularities affirmed by the SR model? The answer, I suppose, is 'Yes', but then it is far from clear that such ultimate explanations are even possible. To parody Wittgenstein, explanations have to come to an end somewhere. As I see it, the fundamental laws about the world are brute facts; if known, they
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would be unexplained explainers. It might be irrational ever to stop seeking explanations, however fine-grained our picture of the world may appear. But we cannot expect to have explanations for the basic laws concerning basic realities. Fisk, of course, believes that reference to a thing's nature may bring explanations to an end. His views on this matter are hard to evaluate because they are hard to understand. He says that 'As necessary $' means 'As 4 by nature,' but it is not clear that '4-ing by nature' means anything more than exhibiting a regularity distinctive of the kind of thing in question. If this is so, Fisk's account would not really be an improvement over the standard empiricist alternative. To convince us that he has succeeded in accounting for the necessity of a SR conditional in a way that others have not, Fisk will have to take further steps in elucidating his conception of a nature. I should add in this connection that Fisk's treatment of causation is as dark as his treatment of a nature. The darkness is introduced by his remarks on free actions. "It is appropriate," he says, "to speak of a cause of a certain condition when the cause only explains the obtaining of that condition when it obtains." This claim is not exact, since a cause could hardly explain the obtaining of a condition when it does not obtain. His idea, however, is that if B occurs in certain circumstances C, A may be its cause even though the presence of A in C would not insure the presence of B. That is, if B does obtain in C, then A is its cause; but the presence of the cause A in C need not bring about B. But this is what is so obscure: How could A be the cause of B if A is not sufficient to bring about B when appropriate circumstances obtain? What does the word 'cause' mean in his account? This needs clarification. A related point needing clarification arises from Fisk's description of the necessity involved in a FS treatment of capacities. Fisk formulates this necessity with a connective of relevant implication as follows: (1)
(+a + [Ba & the circumstances obtain.+ 4aj)
But this formula is equivalent to the following (he says) in a system of relevant implication : (2)
(Ba & the conditions obtain.-+ [4a -+
4~1).
Although (2) would hold necessarily if it were a material conditional,
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Fisk says that the presence of the special connective allows us to view it as "the significant claim that the self-implication property is something an entity has due to the presence of the causal component and the circumstances." I cannot see that this claim is significant. Could an entity fail to have the self-implication property? The answer is 'No'; the formula '($a -+ $a)' is a logical truth. Of course, the statement (2) is not a theorem in a system of relevant implication, but this is only because its consequent is not considered a logically relevant consequence of what is affirmed in its antecedent. Since '($a+ $a)' necessarily holds of any object a , it seems erroneous to say that its truth might depend on the presence of some causal component in certain circumstances. It seems equally erroneous to say that '($a+ $a)' is a relevant consequence of the stated premiss; if the inference of ' ( 4 a - t $a)' from that premiss is not warranted on logical grounds, it doesn't seem warranted at all. One of Fisk's chief reasons for introducing his peculiar notion of causality into his analysis of capacities was to leave room for human freedom. Since it seemed to him 'objectionably ad hoc' to distinguish two kinds of capacities, one for free agents and one for causal contexts, he offered a single analysis that appeared generally applicable. It seems to me, however, that his analysis requires some supplementation if it is to fit cases of freely exercised capacities. The difficulty is that his analysis requires only that some causal component or other be responsible for exercising the capacity in certain circumstances. This does not seem sufficient in the case of freely exercised capacities, for some arcane neurological component might trigger off the appropriate behavior even though the agent had no intention whatever of producing that behavior. If I found myself laughing due to some obscure neurological condition, I might strongly object to the idea that I was freely exercising my capacity to laugh. At the beginning of my comments I expressed some doubts about the plausibility of the SR model as described by Fisk. I want to end my comments by offering some additional remarks on the necessities this model involves. Fisk observes that the conditionals he has in mind are expressed in the subjunctive mood. This is obviously true of what philosophers call 'dispositions'; to say that something is water-soluble is to say that it
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would dissolve if it were put in water. On the first page of his paper Fisk says that the conditional involved in a capacity statement must be necessary because the latter warrants a counterfactual conditional. His reasoning here is mistaken. Many counterfactual conditionals express mere contingencies. If I have reason to believe that Jones has coins in his pocket, I might say to him: "If your hand were in your pocket, you would be touching coins." Clearly, this counterfactual does not express a necessity; the claim it expresses is as contingent as that expressed by "If you had more money, you would (probably) be happier." The fact is, counterfactual conditionals may express a very wide range of claims, from mere conditional possibilities or weak probabilities to firm contingencies and various kinds of necessities. I have already said that necessary SR conditionals are pretty hard to come by at the relatively gross level of ordinary observation. But whether they are rare or even plentiful, the task of explaining why things satisfy them does not seem to differ appreciably from that of explaining why things conform to merely statistical regularities. When we affirm a physically necessary conditional, u e express our confidence (as Hume would say) that no exceptions can be expected to occur. This confidence may have no basis in a belief about fine structure. We may indeed succeed in explaining the necessity by reference to fine structure, but this merely amounts to explaining (I believe) why no exceptions to the regularity can reasonably be anticipated. This task is not different in principle from that of offering a fine-structure explanation of why certain things satisfy a purely statistical hypothesis. If I am right about this, there is no special problem in accounting for physical necessities. The modality of a causal conditional is merely a reflection of our attitude toward the regularity the conditional affirms.2 University of Massachusetts, Amherst NOTES W. V. 0. Quine, Word and Object, Cambridge, Mass. 1960, pp. 222-5. A similar approach to causal conditionals can be found in W. Sellars, 'Counterfactuals, Dispositionals, and the Causal Modalities', in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume I1 (ed. by H. Feigl et al.) Minneapolis 1958, pp. 225-308.
