ABSTRACT
Dispositional properties and powers have been a nuisance for analytic philosophy since its early days. According to strict criteria of empirical evidence, they have been rated unobservable and hence of dubitable ontological status, contrary to their manifestations that are reckoned to be observable and hence respectable citizens in our ontology. Yet, powers or forces fi gure as inevitable terms in laws of nature. Hence, they had to be taken seriously. Dispositional properties have become, and not only in very recent times, a central topic of debate among metaphysicians, some of whom hold that dispositions as such are real existing properties. According to these dispositionalists, the reason for analytic philosophy’s uneasiness concerning dispositions is its basic ontological paradigm, that they call Humeanism. Hence, the dispositionalists’ target is to replace Humeanism with a dispositional paradigm. A basic problem for dispositionalism is in fi nding a persuasive account of the basic ontological structure of dispositional properties.
