ABSTRACT
WE have been arguing that intention-explanations play no very great part in the social sciences, however important the role of such explanations is in daily life or history or fiction. Now it may be feared that this conclusion will make it impossible for us to do justice to the way in which an appeal to dispositions is relied upon in the explanation of human actions. For it is a popular view that human beings in societies are rule-conforming creatures, and that the standard explanation of a piece of social behaviour is not only to show what the agent’s intention was but to indicate, as well, how his goal and the means to it were determined by his disposition to conform to the conventions of his society. It may be thought, therefore, that if it is true that social scientists do not employ intention-explanations, it will also be true that they do not employ disposition-explanations. These, it may be said, are just different forms of what is really the same form of explanation. Thus Richard Peters writes:
