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Ability, modality, and genericity

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Abstract

Accounts of ability in the philosophical literature have tended to be modal ones: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she does in certain non-actual scenarios. In contrast, a prominent account of ability ascriptions in the recent semantics literature appeals to genericity: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she generally manages to do. The latter account resolves some long-standing problems for modal accounts, but encounters problems of its own. I propose a hybrid view, on which ability involves both a modal and a generic element.

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Notes

  1. It may be that modality and genericity are not entirely distinct, for many linguists propose to give a modal account of genericity; see Carlson and Pelletier (1995: 49–57) for citations and discussion. If such views are correct, then a generic view of ability is, at a more fundamental level, itself a kind of modal view. For present purposes I remain neutral on the proper account of genericity; when I say that a generic view is 'amodal' this should be understood only in the uncontroversial sense that there is, at the descriptive level, a distinction to be drawn between modal expressions and generic expressions (even if the latter ultimately admit of some kind of modal analysis).

  2. 'Normal' here is being used simply to denote those modal logics that obey the minimal axioms of Kripke (1963). There are 'non-normal' modal logics on which K is not valid; we will consider how to implement such a logic to give an account of ability in the next subsection.

  3. Brown does introduce an operator that existentially quantifies within sets of worlds, which he describes as a might operator (Brown 1988: 7). So he can acknowledge that, though Tara is not able to sink a hole-in-one, she might sink a hole-in-one (since, after all, she does). A formally similar operator is developed, and proposed as an account of ability, in Cross (1986), which I return to below.

  4. See Horty and Belnap (1995: 611–615) for independent demonstration of the similarity between Brown's proposal and the stit proposal.

  5. The literature on 'stit' has distinguished between several 'stit' operators, and the one described here is what is called the 'deliberative stit' or 'dstit' operator. See Horty and Belnap (1995: 587–595) for an explanation of the difference between this operator and the operator originally introduced in Belnap and Perloff (1988). The treatment of Kenny's cases given here follows the presentation in Horty and Belnap (1995: 610–611); see also Horty (2001: 20–21).

  6. Note that, in a way, the problem of Gina is even more general than this. For consider the case where Gina actually does make a short putt. Still, in such a case, Gina is not able to sink a putt, for she does not see to it that she sinks a putt—for there are a few non-actual histories on which she does not sink a putt. Therefore it is not the case that Gina sees to it that she sinks a putt, and more generally it is never the case that, in similar circumstances, Gina sees to it that she sinks the putt. Therefore it is not the case ◊S stit A. In this sense, this modified case of Gina is not distinguished, within the stit theory, from the case of Tara.

    One might suggest that what the case of Gina shows is not a special problem about ability but a problem about the generic aspect of action itself, a phenomenon emphasized in Thomason (ms.). This, I think, would be a mistake. There are treatments of action claims (such as Davidson 1967) that can adequately handle the fact that agents sometimes perform actions without guaranteeing the outcomes of their actions. If the stit theory cannot accommodate that fact, then that is potentially an independent objection to the stit theory. But whatever our treatment of action claims, we need an account of ability claims that appropriate handles the case of Gina. That is what, I am arguing, neither the stit view nor Brown's view successfully delivers.

  7. Until we have an adequate semantics of the (Gen) operator—something I am not sure we in fact have—this solution remains, in part, a promissory note. It may even be, as noted above, that the (Gen) operator itself ultimately admits of a modal analysis. But this is no objection per se to Bhatt's account, or to the modified generic account that I will eventually defend. These accounts shed light on the problems posed by ability by either solving this problems or, as in this case, by reducing them to more general outstanding problems, in this case to the semantics of (Gen) itself.

  8. A generic account of ability ascriptions which promises to overcome this problem (and others) has recently been proposed in Mandelkern et al. (ms.). There is not space here to discuss this rich proposal, but it bears emphasizing that it is developed in terms of the classical idea that an agent's abilities are to be understood in terms of conditionals relating her volitions to her actions. The account that I will propose in the next section, in contrast, makes no such assumption, instead treating a certain species of agentive modality as non-conditional and indeed as analytically primitive.

  9. The 'open to' here locution is not offered as an analysis of what is meant by options, but only as an elucidation in somewhat more familiar terms; for a defense of the idea that options are analytically primitive, see Maier (2015: 119–120).

  10. While the appeal to options is partly inspired by their centrality to decision theory, the term 'option' is at this point being used in a way that departs from the way it is often used in descriptions of decision theories. Sometimes it is assumed that an agent's options are transparent to her, in the sense that if an action is an option for an agent then she knows (or is in a position to know) that it is an option for her. Options as they are being used here are not subject to any such epistemic requirement. In some respects, what I here call 'options' are more similar to what are typically called 'outcomes' in decision theory. For instance, the decision theorist's 'outcomes' satisfy the principle that of Actuality that I will presently introduce. In other respects they are different. A full treatment of the relationship between the framework adopted here and the ontology of standard decision theory is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

    Note also that, despite my earlier rejection of the stit theory of ability, there are important similarities between the notion of an option that figures here and the notion of an 'action' (or 'choice cell') as it figures in the stit theory. For an important recent treatment of this aspect of stit theory, as well as a modification of it intended to allow for an epistemic requirement on actions, see Horty and Pacuit (ms).

  11. In recent work (Spencer ms.), Jack Spencer devises a number of ingenious cases that purport to show that agents have the ability to perform actions such that it is metaphysically impossible that they perform them (see also Fara 2010). If Spencer's cases are sound, they pose a further problem for modal analyses of ability. For present purposes, it suffices to note that these cases do not show that agents ever have the option of performing such actions; as such, they are compatible with Possibility.

  12. In short, the two proposed senses for 'able' may be distinguished as follows, letting S be an agent, A an action, and OPT the relation of having an action as an option:

    1. (i)

      [[S is able to A]] = 1 iff Gen(S OPT(A))

    2. (ii)

      [[S is able to A]] = 1 iff S OPT(A))

  13. These contexts include those which originally motivated Bhatt's proposal. When 'able' is combined with past tense and perfective aspect, the generic reading appeals not to be available. This gives rise to the problem of the 'actuality entailment'. Why should a sentence such as our earlier (3) be acceptable only if the agent actually performed the act in question? Since, on the present proposal, agents often have the option of performing actions they do not perform, the present semantics, unlike Bhatt's, gives no explanation of the actuality entailment. So the development of a treatment of the actuality entailment within the present semantics has to be left as an unsolved problem. For the difficulties faced here by any proposal, including Bhatt's own, see the discussion in Portner (2009: 203–213).

  14. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of California, Riverside; I am grateful to the audience for discussion. Thanks also to Matthew Mandelkern and Michael Nelson for discussion and correspondence.

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Maier, J. Ability, modality, and genericity. Philos Stud 175, 411–428 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0874-9

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