Dispositions and Rational Explanation Forthcoming in The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Essays for Barry Stroud, Oxford University Press.

Some philosophers hold that rational explanations—explanations of peoples’s attitudes and actions that cite their reasons for forming these attitudes or performing these actions—are dispositional. They hold that rational explanations do their explanatory work by representing these attitudes and actions as the product of dispositions or tendencies on the part of the person who has or performs them. Call this view about the nature of rational explanations dispositionalism. In a few places, Barry Stroud has offered arguments that appear to indicate a commitment to dispositionalism. Here I criticize Stroud’s arguments, offer a general argument against dispositionalism, briefly sketch an alternative account of the explanatory force of rational explanations, and draw some implications for a recurring theme in Stroud’s writings: the threat of explanatory regress.