Intentionality and the physical: a reply to Mumford

Abstract

Martin and Pfeifer (1986) claim “that the most typical characterizations of intentionality” proposed by philosophers are satisfied by physical dispositions. If so, either the philosophers’ “characterizations of intentionality” are wrong or intentionality is the mark, not of the mental, but of the dispositional. Using Martin’s (1994) “electro-fink” argument, Mumford (1999) tries to show that being disposed to do something cannot be a matter of what would happen, if the conditions for the disposition’s manifestation are satisfied. But Martin’s argument rests on the mistaken assumption that causal conditionals of which dispositional ascriptions are an instance are of the form ‘If p then q’.