Katzav on the limitations of dispositionalism

Abstract

Katzav argues that my dispositionalist theory of laws of nature cannot account adequately for the existence of global laws such as Lagrange’s ‘principle of least action’. But he evidently does not understand the theory he is attacking. A sophisticated dispositionalist takes the view that the dispositions of things depend on what kinds of things they are, and accepts that global kinds are ontologically basic. The property of being Lagrangian is an essential property of the global kind in the category of objects or substances. It is therefore a dispositional property of every physical system.