The question of whether the agent had the ability to B turns, for Fara, on the question of whether she was disposed to B when she tried to B. Fara claims, plausibly, that she does have such a disposition.
For this, she was disposed of as human chattel, herded onto a converted slave ship and punished with imprisonment, seven years forced labor, and exile for life.
Instead, she stuffed the wrapping for my hot towel into the gaping sleeve of her kimono, but very beautifully, so that one could forget the fact that she was disposing of garbage.
So she might never say, "I believe in Santa Claus", but she is disposed to have dreams, fantasies, and feelings related to Saint Nick.
These feelings support her recognition of what is right and are a sign that she is disposed to perform her duties.
And yet it may be true throughout that she is disposed to believe the proposition merely upon understanding it (Bealer 1998, p. 209).
Ginsborg (2011a, b; 2012) argues that to mean something by a linguistic expression, the speaker must not only be disposed to use it in a certain way but also be disposed to take the way she is disposed to use it to be "primitively appropriate" (see above, 2.1.1).
She need not actually do any of these things, for she might desire to do something else even more, or might be asleep, or drugged, or otherwise prevented from doing the things she is disposed to do, but she must be (at least to some extent) disposed to do them all else being equal.
The individualistic criterion is that a sentence is an observation sentence for a given person if he or she is disposed to assent to it when (and only when) he or she is undergoing appropriate sensory stimulations, regardless of her internal state (e.g. the ancillary information which he or she possesses).
To be more precise, the suggestion is that someone has the concept of truth just in case he or she is disposed to accept all (noncontroversial) instances of the equivalence schema, i.e., every sentence of the form '
is true if and only if p' that is not paradoxical or in some other way deviant.
If Nora desires tea, this is because she is disposed to get herself some tea, and her dispositions to feel good about tea, think positively about getting tea, or to keep having her thoughts turn toward getting tea are merely associated effects of her desire.
