Explanatory dispositionalism: What anti-humeans should say

Abstract

Inspired both by our ordinary understanding of the world and by reflection on science, anti-Humeanism is a growing trend in metaphysics. Anti-Humeans reject the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience that the world is “just one little thing and then another”, and argue instead that dispositions, powers, or capacities provide connection and (some say) activity in nature. But how exactly are we to understand the shared commitment of this anti-Humean movement? I argue that this kind of anti-Humeanism, at its most general level, is to be understood neither as a view about ontology (the existence of certain properties) nor about fundamentality, but rather as a specific claim about what explains what.