Issues with Xxxxx’x view. The dispositional version of the argument might seem to contradict the intention of the original categorical argument, and because of this it might not appeal to panpsychists as a way of strengthening their case. The first issue is that the idea that phenomenal properties are the only fundamentally dispositional properties we know of goes against the original idea that all physical properties are dispositional (Mørch 2018: 1080). This apparent contradiction disappears if we understand the original claim as the notion that “physical properties are dispositional in the non-fundamental sense of being reducible to relations between circumstances and manifestations”; as the notion that physics reveals only purely relational or structural properties but no intrinsic or non-relational properties “of either the categorical or fundamentally dispositional kind” (Mørch 2018: 1080). That is, the original claim does not necessarily specify what is fundamentally dispositional, so this objection can be avoided. The second problem is the apparent contradiction between the view that phenomenal properties are dispositional and the view that phenomenal properties are categorical. The solution that Xxxxx (2018) proposes is the identity view of powers (Xxxxxx & Xxxx 1999, Xxxx 2003, Strawson 2008), the idea that all properties are necessarily both dispositional and categorical. That is, those terms are merely different ways of conceptualising the same property. Accepting this view avoids the contradiction, though it renders Xxxxx’x argument weaker since it now depends on the specific commitment to the identity theory of powers. (This will be addressed in greater detail in the next section.) However, even if the identity view is unconvincing, the panpsychists who endorsed the original categorical argument “would have been wrong to say that phenomenal properties are categorical” but they would still “have been right to say that phenomenal properties are intrinsic (given that both categorical and fundamentally dispositional properties are intrinsic)” (Mørch 2018: 1080). Their error would then lie only in conflating the notions of categoricity and intrinsicality, which is “arguably not a very radical mistake” (Mørch 2018: 1080). So, she argues that proponents of the original argument could endorse her argument without contradiction, if they accept that the original argument contains ambiguity or a mistake with regard to conflating ‘categorical’ and ‘intrinsic’ (Mørch 2018: 1080). ...
