Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 12:26:57 -0500
Subject: RE: BHA: Ellis, Scientific Essentialism


Hi Ronny,

Thanks for your comments.  Yes -- I would love to see the review.  (Do you know that it turns out that Ellis was the professor of *my* former professor, who is also a philosopher of science!  What a small world.)
  
There is one point that I still don't understand.  I have followed that with a more substantive thought or two.

Here's the part I'm still confused about:


>2) Dispositional Essentialism
>Ellis follows Shoemaker in constructing causal, dispositional or modal 
>properties as the essences of substantive kinds. ... Ellis is quite explicit in 
>treating tropes as ontological dependent on substances but is more ambiguous 
>on processes and events.

Yes; I'm not sure if it's him or me, but I'm still unclear on the relations of ontological dependence between kinds.  Here's what we seem to have:  (I say "seem" because I assume that I'm confused about something here.)

1.  PROPERTY-kinds (specifically, dispositional ones) are in some sense more ontologically basic than SUBSTANCE and PROCESS-kinds, because dispositional  PROPERTY-kinds constitute the real essences of SUBSTANCE-kinds (and I'm pretty sure for Ellis PROCESS-kinds).

2. SUBSTANCE-kinds are in some sense more basic than PROPERTY and PROCESS-kinds, because tropes, which are the instances of PROPERTY-kinds, are ontologically dependent on the instances of SUBSTANCE-kinds.

It seems circular.  At the same time, we *are* talking about somewhat different things in #1 and #2.  #1 is about the nature of real essences.  #2 is about Ellis being a materialist (and from the perspective of DPF a proponent of ontological monovalence).  Have I simply made a category mistake in expressing both issues in terms of dependency between the three types of KIND? 


More substantively (no pun intended), two things that interest me about Ellis in relation to Bhaskar are (1) Ellis' conception of causality as a type of relationship between PROCESS-kinds rather than as the expression of dispositional properties (or as the action of a powerful particular, as in Harre and Madden), and (2) Ellis' relative de-emphasis of the concept causality in his critique of Hume (in favor of a focus on whether or not objects are essentially disposition-less). 

Also, when Bhaskar says in RTS that a thing has powers in virtue of what it is,  it sounds as though he thought then of "powers" as arising from, or being a function of, a thing's non-dispositional characteristics.  Ellis I take it would be opposed to this way of thinking about it -- the whole point is that the dispositions, the "powers," are the essence of the thing, not emergent properties of it.  Bhaskar allows for this -- says its true sometimes that a thing just IS its powers -- but seems to think that most of the time the powers are a function of other features of the thing.  I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on this seeming difference between Ellis and Bhaskar.

  r.



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