Abstract
Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers fail as general accounts of abilities, and discusses the ramifications of this result.
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Notes
One reason why my question has received less attention in the literature may be that its answer has been thought to follow easily from an answer to questions about agency. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for the suggestion.) If so, my argument in Sect. 2.4 should show that it does not do so easily, and point to some reasons why.
Both views presuppose that dispositions are individuated by two factors: a characteristic stimulus (the condition under which the disposition would manifest) and manifestation. I have argued against this view of dispositions elsewhere (Vetter 2013, 2014). But it is the standard view, and I will accept it for present purposes; I do not claim that my own preferred view of dispositions, which does without the stimulus condition, provides a better framework for a dispositional account of abilities.
Moore makes a number of suggestions that are strictly speaking distinct, though he does not explicitly distinguish them. But this analysis is arguably the most influential of them, which has come to be associated with his name.
Strictly speaking, Vihvelin endorses (D1) only as an analysis of simple abilities, and thinks of the abilities that are relevant for compatibilist freedom as ‘bundles’ of such simpler abilities as captured in (D1) (Vihvelin 2004, p. 431). Her more recent views are even more cautious: in Vihvelin (2013, p. 180), she claims only that some of the abilities required for compatibilist freedom are roughly of the type characterized in (D1), with the relevant stimulus condition being trying to A. She does not, however, give a general account of the abilities that are required, or of abilities in general.
The term is from O’Shaughnessy (1980).
Similar examples have been used by others, e.g. Clarke and Mele; for more, see Sect. 2.4. A third class of counterexamples, which I ignore here because I have chosen to focus on agentive abilities, is given in Löwenstein (forthcoming) and stems from the realm of broadly cognitive abilities. Löwenstein notes that many of our cognitive abilities (my term) can be exercised not only without, but against, our intentions. His example is the ability to read written text. I may intend not to read the advertisements that line the street because I believe that they are manipulative. And yet when presented with advertisements, I will often competently interpret them, manifesting my ability to read them quite despite myself.
I owe this example, as well as that of grace, to Ralf Busse.
To refute (D1), we need not suppose that the agents in the examples would never A if they tried or intended to A, but only that it is not the case that they would A in sufficiently many cases where they so tried or intended (and nothing interferes). To avoid disputes over which proportion of cases would be sufficient, I have made the examples stronger than may be logically required: I am imagining that agents in question never or nearly never A upon trying or intending to A.
Many thanks to Erasmus Mayr and Carolina Sartorio for helpful discussion on the material of this section.
Vihvelin (2013) ties trying to intending, claiming that we ‘try to do X whenever we acquire an intention or desire to do X, here and now, and that intention or desire causes at least the beginning of the process of doing something that we believe, perhaps mistakenly, will move us closer towards our goal of doing X’ (Vihvelin 2013, p. 176). On this view, it is not clear that sub-intentional actions and our abilities for them always involve trying.
Of course, dispositions need not be surefire: their stimulus need not guarantee the occurrence of their manifestation. But they should at least incline their bearers to exhibit the manifestation upon being subject to the stimulus, in the sense that the manifestation is (ceteris paribus) more likely than its absence. In the cases that we have seen, this does not appear to be the case: if there are thousands of equally good ways of executing a given intention, I am no more likely to take one of them than not to take it upon forming the intention.
Here are some of the statements that I interpret along the lines of (D2):
Competences are dispositions of an agent to perform well ...Dispositions, and competences in particular, are associated with trigger-manifestation conditionals. ...Your archery competence corresponds to: if you were to shoot at a target you would likely hit it. (Sosa 2010, p. 465f.)
A competence is a disposition, with a basis resident in the competent agent, one that would in appropriately normal conditions ensure (or make highly likely) the success of any relevant performance issued by it. (Sosa 2007, p. 29)
S has an ability A(R/C) relative to environment E = Across the set of relevantly close worlds W where S is in C and in E, S has a high rate of success in achieving R. (Greco 2010, p. 77)
Some of the complications in these formulations (the reference to normal conditions, to likelihood and rates of success) I take to play the role of excluding such things as finks and masks, and therefore to be irrelevant to my purposes. My counterexamples do not rely on finks, masks or other interfering factors to which dispositions are subject.
Compare Sosa: ‘Your archery competence corresponds to: if you were to shoot at a target you would likely hit it’ (Sosa 2010, p. 466).
In addition, Jaster (2016) develops a view that combines features of both (D1) and (D2) but is not clearly dispositional.
Many thanks to Ralf Busse, Ellen Fridland, David Löwenstein, John Maier, Erasmus Mayr, Carolina Sartorio, and Pietro Snider, as well as audiences at Leipzig, Innsbruck, Birmingham, Bayreuth, Berlin, and Zürich. Many thanks also to the anonymous referees, whose comments much improved the paper. And special thanks to Romy Jaster, with whom I have been discussing abilities for years, and from whom I continue to learn.
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Vetter, B. Are abilities dispositions?. Synthese 196, 201–220 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1152-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1152-7