Kripke in his famous book on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that there can be no fact of the matter as to what a speaker means by her words, that is, no fact that can meet the Constitution Demand and the Normativity Demand. He particularly argues against the dispositional view, according to which meaning facts are constituted by facts about the speaker’s dispositions to respond in a certain way on certain occasions. He argues that facts about dispositions are finite and are incapable of constituting facts about what speakers mean by their words; they are also essentially descriptive, not prescriptive and, thus, cannot meet the Normativity Demand. Hannah Ginsborg has recently attempted to resist Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s arguments against dispositionalism by defending a new sort of reductive dispositionalism which can meet both demands at the same time. In this paper, I will argue that she would not be successful in her project.

The present paper is initially intended to provide an introduction to the literature on the metaphysics and semantics of dispositions in analytic philosophy. To this end, I characterize five semantic approaches to disposition ascriptions (the simple conditional analysis, the modified conditional analyses, the unanalyzable approach, the generic account, and the graded models) and show what kind of metaphysic is consistent with each of them. With this survey on the table, I am inclined to say that the arguments against the simple and modified conditional analyses are sufficiently good to refute these analyses. In addition to that, I put forward several arguments against the generic account and the graded model, arguing that the unanalyzable approach is preferable to its opponents. Finally, given this analyzability and the possibility of unmanifesting dispositions, I side with the kind of dispositionalism suggested by Martin and Heil.

Most of the scientific answers given to the problem of consciousness have either slipped towards reductionism or tried to explain it through functionalism. The common deficiency of most of them is ignoring the phenomenological and qualitative aspects of consciousness. The view of neural Darwinism has the advantage that, despite being scientific, it leaves aside both reductionist and functionalist perspectives. This view seeks to explain consciousness through the mechanism of natural selection in forming neural groups. Although this theory overcomes most of the contemporary challenges that consciousness has faced, such as Blind-sight, it leaves the hard problem or the explanation of Qualia untouched. In this regard, this view suffers from a kind of inadequacy of empirical data to determine the theory. In this article, a proposal is made to complete and develop this theory in order to overcome the mentioned deficiency. This is done by introducing a Multiple Supervenience that is rooted in Dispositionalism. This relationship relates basic properties to higher-order properties but differs from the classical supervenience in that it can explain the specific causal relationship between levels. The paper shows that this Multiple Supervenience is applicable to the theory of neuronal Darwinism. In order to explain consciousness, Neural Darwinism uses the potential of individual neurons or groups of neurons and the stimuli obtained through external sensors, as well as emergent properties.