Encyclopedia:

“Dispositionalism is a stark contrast to categoricalism, maintaining that all properties have dispositional essences. The dispositionalist charges that the categoricalist’s appeal to the internal or self-contained nature of a property as its essence is unintelligible unless it is somehow related to the causal or nomic powers of its instances. On dispositionalism, as noted earlier, a given property endows all of its instances with the same dispositions, no matter what circumstances they are situated in. Dispositionalism then necessitates a diametrically opposing view of laws of nature to the one necessitated by categoricalism…”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dispositions/

Fragility, for example, is both a real disposition of glass to break upon being struck and abstraction from the underlying molecular structure. Squareness, to take another example, is both a quality of having four sides of equal length that meet at equal angles and an abstraction from the fact this property interacts with its environment to leave square impressions on soft wax (when combined with the property ‘hardness’).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition

Dispositional attribution is a phenomenon in personality psychology that refers to the tendency to assign responsibility for the behavior of others to their inherent characteristics rather than the external (situational) influences that stem from the environment or culture in which that individual is found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispositional_attribution

Opponent of Dispositionalism:

Dispositionalism is the view that believing a proposition is nothing more than having a certain set of dispositions.

https://slidelegend.com/against-dispositionalism-belief-in-cognitive-science-springer-link_5a0549bf1723dd0302badff4.html

Response to objection:

A property is not categorical in that it cannot exist except through instances- object having that property. A property does not cause any particular object to act in a certain way since that property is seen as internal to that object and therefore cannot act upon it as a cause. In that sense, the property only exists as a disposition, side-by-side with other dispositions, and a particular cause acting upon an object will then decide which disposition or property of the object defines the object and its behavior.

A categorical view of belief does not allow for a person’s beliefs, that certain psychology property known as belief, to exist side-by-side with freedom or will. A person’s beliefs will determine their behavior, and to understand their beliefs is to understand them under all circumstances. In fact, belief cannot determine behavior since that belief is internal to the person and cannot act as a cause. Beliefs can interact with each other to inspire thought, but these beliefs interact as properties do, abstractly, and do not cause the believer to behave in any particular way.

When a believer acts, or believers act in unison, they do so because their dispositions combined with causal factors in their environment, creating an act- the instance of a person uniting with their disposition. This act observed by others becomes the identity of the actor or the believer, from which follows that they will likely continue to act in such a way. Another of their dispositions, combined with different causal factors, will then form a different act, and observed again will lead to alternate identities for those same individuals formed within the same observers. Those observing will then have a different, conflicting view, allowing them to see the believers as more than just the products of their beliefs but in fact whole individuals with innumerable dispositions.

While Marxism does emphasize categorical thinking, (for example, the working class must work for the capitalist despite exploitation) it does not allow for the material existence of categories which act upon material objects. The working class, in our example, does work because it is the working class. Its working causes us to see it as the working class. A worker who does not work may be impelled to work, not because he or she is part of the working class, but because the disposition to work exists in the individual and the causative external factors have given expression to that disposition within the individual. If a worker does not work, we still see him or her as working class because that disposition exists within. Their resistance to exploitation also exists as a disposition and so we, as Marxists, observe that resistance and the acts it produces as their identity rather than seeing their exploited existence as a product of their belief in work.