Elisa Galgut, 'Richard Wollheim on Disposition and Phantasies'

For Wollheim, a disposition modifies a person in three main ways – by constraining one’s mental states, by regulating behaviour, and by generating or reinforcing existing dispositions. Dispositions are central to our psychology – they form part of that thread of life that runs through our mental states and our actions. Dispositions serve as backgrounds to our mental states, or they may feature in the phenomenology of our mental states. 

But dispositions can also be denied: in what Wollheim terms derealization and depersonalization, either parts of the world, or parts of ourselves, are, respectively, disavowed or disowned. And dispositions are at work here too – both in that dispositions themselves may be disavowed, or that disavowal becomes dispositional. Wollheim writes: “Secondly, in parallel with the general pattern exhibited by introjection, having phantasised the expulsion of this figure, he will then be disposed to phantasise it as continuing to exist in the other world” (The Thread of Life, 271). 

When dispositions are in the business of falsifying either internal or external reality, they cannot feature in at least some part of the phenomenology of our mental states. The disposition to deny reality is not something that we can represent to ourselves. 

I examine this relationship between dispositions and phenomenology in connection with Wollheim’s distinction between acting on phantasy and acting on desire; in the former, I venture, dispositions are never represented in phenomenology, but are, rather, disguised or denied. Can we trace ways in which this denial or disguise is manifested so as to distinguish cases where disposition is not denied, but simply serve as backgrounds to our mental states?