Introduction: When Regularity Feels Like Explanation
Traits and dispositions are the most familiar examples of inner causes. Personality, temperament, and instinctive tendencies seem to provide ready-made explanations: they are identifiable, seemingly stable, and easily invoked. Yet their apparent explanatory power often arises from how they function rhetorically rather than ontologically.
1. Traits as Anchors of Predictability
Traits give the impression of predictive security. If someone is considered extroverted, we anticipate sociable behaviour across contexts. If someone is described as aggressive, we expect certain patterns of action. This feels explanatory because it offers an internal “handle” to grasp the phenomenon.
However, the predictive sense is derived from statistical regularities, not from a mechanism that necessitates the behaviour. The trait functions as a placeholder for relational dynamics that are distributed across interactions and situations.
2. Dispositions and the Seduction of Stability
Dispositions, like tendencies or proclivities, appear to exist independently of context. Their solidity is seductive:
They are framed as enduring properties.
They can be measured, catalogued, and named.
They appear to unify diverse behaviours under a single label.
This stability gives the illusion of sufficiency: once the disposition is identified, explanation is felt to be complete.
3. The Rhetorical Function of Habitual Patterns
Repeated behaviours or habits further consolidate explanatory authority. The observation that someone “always acts this way” becomes an internal justification. Repetition is mistaken for causal depth; regularity is mistaken for necessity.
The explanatory power is therefore performative: it produces conviction in the observer, even though it does not account for the relational processes sustaining the behaviour.
4. When Closure Feels Natural
Traits and dispositions are powerful closure devices because they:
Reduce complex interactions to a single, identifiable locus.
Align with the intuition that explanations should be compact and bounded.
Reassure by presenting behaviour as internally grounded rather than emergent from relational contexts.
The ease and confidence with which we invoke internal dispositions make closure psychologically compelling.
5. Preparing for the Next Step
Understanding how traits and dispositions function rhetorically sets the stage for examining stored meanings and internal representations. These too act as closure devices, giving the appearance of explanation while masking the relational structures that actually sustain phenomena.
In the next post, we will explore how memory, beliefs, and symbolic knowledge contribute to the seductive power of inner causes.
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