Real Dispositions in the Physical World

[Laird]

But doesn't the problem of diffusing the notion of cause still occur? We still go from the focused explanation of lighting a match due to, say, combustibility and friction of specific elements and now have to include absence/presence of other causes?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "diffusing the notion of cause". To the extent that I do understand, I don't think that this has ever been a problem for the causal necessitarians ("determinists") anyway, who have always been quite happy to allow, for example, that in the absence of any other forces, gravity (or, in the terms of this paper, the gravitational powers exercised by the two objects) causes two objects to draw nearer (in such a consistent manner that they would describe it to be necessary), whereas introducing another force, such as by giving each object an electrostatic charge of the same polarity, could counteract the gravitational force (again, in such a consistent manner that they would deem it to also be necessary).

I do they think they are on to something relevant in that only by distinguishing the direct sources of a cause-effect relation, as in the primary contributors of causal dispositions, are we able to do science and take advantage of its applications.

Sure, and I agree. I did say in my original post that I thought that the concept was useful - and yes, not just for free will, but for the physical sciences too.

(After all the manifestations of causal powers can still result in deterministic causal sequences, just ones that can at least hypothetically be interrupted.)

Right - that's essentially what I'm saying the causal necessitarians could claim.

Cosmic Hylomorphism: A powerist ontology of quantum mechanics

William M. R. Simpson

However, many philosophers have found Humean accounts of laws to be deeply unsatisfactory. According to Humeans, the Bohmian laws that physicists have put forward, in order to explain such phenomena as quantum entanglement, depend for their lawfulness upon the global configuration of particles, and are thus constituted by that which they seek to explain. Yet, as Armstrong complained, ‘a fact cannot be used to explain itself’ (Armstrong1983, p.40). In making this claim, Armstrong was echoing Plato’s insight that things are explained by being referred to a ‘higher principle’. The Mill-Ramsey-Lewis account, however, not only fails to maintain the necessary metaphysical distance between explanans and explanandum, but reverses the proper order of explanation: laws are supposed to explain instances that fall under them, yet the lawfulness of laws in this model is grounded in the instances they are supposed to explain.

Doubts have also been raised about the logical coherence of the Super-Humean attempt to make the doctrine of Humean Supervenience compatible with the phenomenon of quantum entanglement (Miller2013;Esfeld2014b). For example, in rejecting the standard neo-Humean commitment to an ontology of sparse natural properties, the primitive ontology approach adopted by Super-Humeans removes an objective constraint upon rival systems of laws, leading to subjectivism about the laws of nature (Matarese2018). It has also been called into question whether Super-Humean matter points can serve as the referents of the Bohmian law of motion, since there is good reason to doubt that matter points persist through time (Simpson2020).(For further criticisms, see Lazarovici (2018) and Wilson (2018).)

In the alternative ontology I wish to propose, which inherits the primitive ontology of Goldstein et al. (2005a, b), I shall favour an Aristotelian-essentialist accountof laws, in which laws neither govern nor describe the physical world, but express the nature of powers(Bird2007, chp. 9). Powerist ontologies for quantum mechanics have received less attention than Humean ontologies. In order to build a metaphysical model that incorporates a power to choreograph the trajectories of the particles according to the Bohmian law of motion, however, a powerist must answer a number of metaphysical questions. To begin with, what sort of thing might be supposed to possess a causal power which could ground the Bohmian law of motion? There are two answers one might be tempted to give. First, we might posit the existence of an entity, in addition to the particles that compose the objects of scientific inquiry, which has an intrinsic power to move all of the particles through physical space. Secondly,we might deny that this power is manifested by some separate agent that transcends the world of physical particles, and seek to explain how the cosmos as a whole maybe said to have an immanent power to govern their trajectories.