Fitness and Dispositional Properties
(2025) VUB/Ghent LHPS Day — Location: Brussels, Belgium (24.January.2025)
Files
2025_Disposition_VUB.pdf
slides
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 339.33 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- This paper picks up on an objection to the account of individual fitness presented in Pence and Ramsey (2013) that has bothered me for the twelve years since that paper was published. Being a contribution to the propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) literature, it proposed that evolutionary fitness is a dispositional property of individual organisms, realized as an organism – with a particular genome and placed in a particular environment – lives its life. Robert Brandon once wondered whether a disposition like that – one that’s constantly in the process of realization, where the classic distinction between the disposition, its categorical basis, and its manifestation conditions is difficult to draw – might not make metaphysical sense. Here, I attempt to respond to that objection, by placing this work on fitness in the context of recent work on the metaphysics of dispositions, drawn especially from Barbara Vetter’s concept of potentiality.
- Affiliations
Citations
Pence, C. (2025). Fitness and Dispositional Properties. VUB/Ghent LHPS Day, Brussels, Belgium. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/275054