Suppose I become negatively electrically charged. I then acquire a bunch of dispositional properties, such as the property of repelling electrons and attracting positrons. But have I gained any basic dispositional properties?
One could take one of two views here:
- In becoming charged, I took on new basic dispositional properties characteristic of charge.
- Prior to being charged, I already had the dispositional property of being such as to repel electrons and attract positrons when negatively charged.
On the first view, charge is a dispositional property. On the second view, charge is not a dispositional property
per se, but a triggering condition for a dispositional property I already had. An advantage of the first view is that it helps explain why it is that charge makes
anything that has it be
ceteris paribus attractive to electrons and repellent to positrons. On the second view, it is just a coincidence or a matter of divine arrangement that all the material things there are have the dispositional property stated in (2). On the other hand, the second view is slightly neater in a different way, because it allows one to say that all dispositional properties are grounded in the essences of things. I suspect that only a generalization of the first view lets one preserve the Catholic view that pursuit of the supernatural end of human life is something graciously superadded on top of our nature.
