Mttbnchtt
commented
4 years ago Barry Smith's paper Mental Capabilities is also relevant.
Open Mttbnchtt opened 4 years ago
Mttbnchtt
commented
4 years ago Barry Smith's paper Mental Capabilities is also relevant.
Barry Smith's book Building ontologies with BFO at p. 101 says: "A disposition is a realizable entity in virtue of which—for example, through appropriate triggers—a process of a certain kind occurs (or can occur or is likely to occur) in the independent continuant in which the disposition inheres. This process is called the realization of the disposition. The trigger might consist in the objects being placed in a certain environment or being subjected to certain external influence, or it may be some internal event within the object itself. Unlike a role, a disposition is a realizable entity that is such that, if it ceases to exist, then its bearer is physically changed. Dispositions are in this sense (and in contrast to what is the case with roles) not optional" (emphasis added).
The mention of triggers suggests that the authors had something that, at a still generic and yet more informative level, one could characterize as follows: An object is disposed to M when C iff it would M if it were the case that C (see Dispositions).
However, the authors also write that if P ceases to have dispositions D, then P physically changes. This means, I would argue, that what are dispositions in SDGIO are not always dispositions in BFO. An example is "permission to access".
A related worry is that SDGIO confuses dispositions, powers, capacities, and abilities. The first paragraph of this article, for example, provides prima-facie good reasons to be suspicious of a classification of power, capacities, and abilities as types of dispositions (while SDGIO put "ability to access" under "disposition").