Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Dispositional concepts like fragile or vulnerable are crucial for prediction and action planning, yet no established cognitive theory explains their mental representation. We propose a relevance theory of dispositions, positing that the function of dispositional concepts is to encode an object's disposition-characteristic behavior across relevant situations. We formalize this theory as an idealized cognitive mechanism, in which dispositional strength is calculated as a sum of response intensities across situations weighted by relevance. We test this theory in three experiments examining judgments of vulnerability, fragility, flammability, and solubility. Their results show that a disposition is judged stronger when it would manifest in actual rather than merely possible situations (Experiment 1), in situations an agent intends to realize (Experiment 2), and in high-stakes situations (Experiment 3).