 A famous argument for categoricalism due to Armstrong (1997, p. 79) is that dispositions are Meinongian—or, in Handfield’s (2005) terms, dispositions are modally inverted. Suppose that a fragile glass \(x\) doesn’t break. But \(x\) is fragile inasmuch as it would break in response to being struck under suitable conditions. If so, \(x\)’s being fragile has within itself, essentially, an implicit reference to the manifestation, namely, the event of breaking, that didn’t occur. That is, it points to an entirely counterfactual state of affair, in which sense the property of fragility is at least partly ‘hypothetical’. Armstrong takes it that this consequence is a version of Meinongianism, a metaphysical position that accepts an overly generous ontology including non-existent entities, which he finds obnoxious (see Handfield 2008a for an attempt to get around this objection). Armstrong goes on to offer what he calls an irenic or soft deflationist doctrine of dispositional properties. On this view, we can account for the truth-makers of disposition ascriptions in terms of categorical properties and laws of nature. Thus understood, to say that \(x\) is fragile is not to ascribe a real property to \(x\). Rather, it is an abbreviated way of saying that, given laws of nature, from \(x\)’s being struck, we can infer that \(x\) would break. On Armstrong’s view, we do not use dispositional terms to describe irreducibly dispositional states of affairs. Rather, they are merely convenient ways of talking about categorical properties.