Dispositionalism

The view — defended in the course by entities/rani-lill-anjum — that properties have real causal powers or dispositions, and causation happens when dispositions manifest. Roots in Aristotle and Aquinas; revived by Mumford, Anjum, Cartwright, C.B. Martin.

Core commitments

The dispositional modality — a third modality between pure contingency (Hume) and necessity: causes tend or dispose toward their effects (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-09-from-regularities-to-tendencies).
Dispositions can exist unmanifested — dynamite is explosive whether or not it explodes; an apple seed's cyanide is poisonous even if it never poisons anyone.
Tendencies come in degrees, can be counteracted, enforced, or overridden by other dispositions.
Mutual manifestation partners (C.B. Martin) — a fire needs flammable material and oxygen; none of the partners could produce the effect alone (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-07-one-effect-one-cause).
Singularism — each causal set-up is unique; causation can occur in a one-off instance (Big Bang), so repetition is not required for causation (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-11-is-more-data-better).

Epistemological implications

Tendencies are not reducible to statistical frequencies for several reasons: ecological fallacy (individual ≠ average), individual variation, unique events, strong-but-rare tendencies, weak-but-frequent tendencies.
Therefore, qualitative methods, case studies, mechanistic reasoning and N=1 studies can be more evidential than large-N statistics for some causal questions.
Predictions become tendency claims — "C disposes toward E" — which are fallible but informative, not vacuously true (sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-18-risky-predictions).

Rivals

concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation (Hume) — the main rival on the universalist side.
Conditional necessity — a weaker tendency-talk on which causes necessitate effects when all conditions are right. Dispositionalism denies this: even in ideal conditions, manifestation is not guaranteed.

Relevance to BPM

Tendency-framed predictions fit process monitoring well: a PPM model outputting "case X tends toward SLA violation given its current prefix" is a dispositional claim, not a regularity or counterfactual claim. This is explicit in how tendencies are framed in sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-18-risky-predictions.

concepts/causation · concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation · concepts/probabilistic-causation (propensity theory is dispositionalism's probabilistic cousin) · concepts/mechanisms-in-science · concepts/rct-limitations