Where does disposition collide?

A disposition in metaphysics is a property a thing has in virtue of what it would do or how it would change under specified conditions, even when nothing is currently happening: a glass is fragile because it would break if struck, and sugar is soluble because it would dissolve if placed in water. Such dispositional properties are picked out by a conditional, so that to be fragile is, on the simplest analysis, to be such that if struck one would break. In The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle used this idea to argue that many mental terms name dispositions rather than inner episodes, so that to say someone is vain or knows French is to say how they are disposed to behave, not to report a hidden private event. The referent is a modal tendency, a standing capacity to manifest a behaviour when the triggering conditions are met, and it is a property of things and minds studied in metaphysics, not a personality trait measured on a scale, a court's ruling, or an army's layout.[1]

Unit

A conditional tendency to manifest a behaviour under stated conditions

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed by philosophers through the conditional it supports and the conditions that would trigger its manifestation

In personality psychology a disposition is a trait, a relatively stable internal tendency to think, feel, and act in a consistent way across situations and over time. Someone high in the disposition of conscientiousness is expected to be orderly and dependable whether at work or at home, and traits like it are the dispositional units of most personality models, including the Big Five, where each person is placed on a set of broad, enduring dimensions. Walter Mischel's Personality and Assessment (1968) challenged this picture, arguing that behaviour is far less consistent across situations than trait language assumes, which opened the long person-situation debate over how stable such dispositions really are. The referent is a measured regularity in a person's conduct, estimated from self-report or observation and expressed as a position on a trait scale, and it is not a metaphysician's conditional tendency, a court's decision, or the placing of troops.[2]

Unit

A stable trait, as a person's standing on a behavioural dimension

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated from self-report questionnaires or observer ratings and expressed as a score on a trait scale, with consistency tested across situations