jon1

Could someone please tell me what a disjunctive property is?

Bill Snedden

Hmmm...I'm not at all sure what a disjunctive property is, but perhaps this will help.

A disjunction is a "...compound statement that is true whenever either one or both of its component statements (the disjuncts) are true."

From Garth Kemerling's Philosophy Pages.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

jon1

I've only heard "disjunctive property" used in one place before and that was in Jaegwon Kim's "Philosophy of Mind". He uses it when discussing Functionalism. It goes like this... mental property M is the property of having a property with causal specification H. Then it goes on to say that given multiple realizability of mental properties that for every mental property M there will be many properties Q1,Q2, etc... that meet the causal specification H and anything will count as instantiating M if it instantiates one of the Q's. Now given this way of looking at it the mental M is a second order property and the Q's (M's realizers) are first order properties. Then it says if M is the property of having some property meeting specification H and Q1,Q2, etc... are those properties meeting specification H it would seem that M is identical with the "disjunctive property" of having Q1 or Q2 or any of the other Q's.