Competing Themes in the Martin-Heil Identity Theory of Properties

I am sympathetic to Martin and Heil’s attempts to address the tension between the need to account for the world both qualitatively and dispositionally. We have an overwhelming sense of the world as being spatially-oriented, and it seems that we derive this sensation from the properties of things. Yet, we are aware that without the power or ability of things to be perceived—to affect us in the ways that they do—we would lack the capacity to sense this ostensible spatial primacy of the world in which we live. However, although sympathetic to the reasons for positing a synthesis of the dispositional and qualitative, I do not think that the Martin-Heil attempt to identify the two is successful.