This article offers an analysis of how dispositional language is used in biology, psychology, and the social sciences. The purpose of the article is to answer, firstly, the question of how dispositions and things similar to them are understood by scientists, and secondly, to answer the questions of what terms dispositions and disposition-like entities are used to designate, and how these terms relate to each other. The variety of scientific approaches to understanding behavioral dispositions indicates that there exists between them a family resemblance that is not defined in terms of necessary and sufficient properties. A more realistic approach to understanding behavioral dispositions is to describe them in terms of examples and partial generalizations. From this point of view, a family of behavioral dispositions can be described as a set of patterns, tendencies, or causes of probable behavior observed or predicted under certain circumstances. At the same time, in the behavioral sciences a number of terms are used that denote behavioral dispositions and similar things in different languages, which form sets of synonyms – synsets. Thus, in the Russian and English languages there are a number of synsets presented in the lexical databases WordNet and RuWordNet and denoting the entire family of behavioral dispositions or some of its subsets. The key semantic idea here is that it is not so much the individual synonyms included in a synset that have meaning, but rather the synset as a whole or even a system of synsets.