Abstract

The challenge of The Dappled World is to filter out its more unqualified slogans, and to expose thereby a genuinely provocative and highly intuitive, potentially compelling picture of the world and various sciences which attempt to map it. One could be forgiven for failing to engage with this picture, for it is overshadowed by the rhetoric of more strident claims. After successful filtration, however, several of the core ideas are revealed as issuing an account of subjects of great importance to both philosophers of science and metaphysicians: the nature of laws, and the importance of dispositional properties, or ‘capacities’.