ABSTRACT
The author challenges the consensus about the monopoly of micro properties in matters of causal efficacy, by showing that it is coherent, and at least sometimes also plausible, to conceive of dispositional macro properties as causally efficacious and nevertheless distinct from the microscopic properties in their reduction base. He argues that D. M Armstrong and the functionalists have offered specifically against the idea that dispositional macroscopic properties, which are micro-reducible, have their own causal efficacy. The micro- and macroproperties do not compete for being the property that is causally responsible for the manifestation of the disposition. The author sketches a general account of the role dispositions play in explanations, and in particular scientific explanations and argues that the distinction between the dispositional and the categorical bears on predicates rather than on the properties those predicates designate.
