Abstract
Power Structuralism is a powers-only ontology, built on what is known as the Eleatic Principle: only what is causally powerful is real. In this chapter I concentrate on three distinctive tenets of Power Structuralism. I show how there is actuality at the bedrock of this ontology, without there being categorical (i.e., causally inert) properties. I distinguish between two types of power, and consequently two types of manifestation. The modality of power manifestations is conditional necessity. Causal interactions are explained in terms of a special type of monadic property – namely, directed power tropes, and their manifestation partners. Such powers are ontologically interdependent with their manifestation partners. I argue that the nature of causal interactions is relational; and bipolar.
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Notes
- 1.
Power Structuralism is introduced in fuller details in Marmodoro (2017).
- 2.
I use ‘elementary entities’ to refer to those entities which are fundamental in the ontology of the world. I use David Lewis’ term ‘sparse’ for the elementary ontology of nature, meaning that ‘sparse properties carve out the joints of nature on which the causal powers hinge’. See Schaffer (2004).
- 3.
Pace Aristotle, I argue that their difference is not a single structure, the substantial form, but structures of two different kinds. I argue for this point in my (2017).
- 4.
See, e.g., Armstrong (1997), p. 79.
- 5.
See Bird (2007), ch. 4, for an insightful discussion. The main concern with categorical properties is their inertness, which cuts them off our cognitive reach, since they cannot interact with us in any way.
- 6.
The expression “always packing, never travelling” is first used by Molnar (2003, p. 173).
- 7.
See, e.g., Mumford and Anjum: “The manifestation of a power will […] be itself a further power or cluster of powers” (2011, p. 5, my emphasis).
- 8.
The four fundamental forces, the week nuclear, the strong nuclear, the electromagnetic and the gravitational forces, are not additional powers for physicists. Rather, they are considered four fundamental interactions, explained as the emission and absorption of elementary particles. So, following my description above, the four fundamental interactions are emissions and absorptions of combinations of fundamental powers constituting elementary particles.
- 9.
More explicitly, it is powerfulness that is real rather than any carrier of it.
- 10.
See, e.g., “Virtual particles are viewed as the quanta that describe fields of the basic force interactions, which cannot be described in terms of real particles” (http://dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr/VIRTUAL%20PARTICLE/en-en/, last accessed on 8 May 2019).
- 11.
By contrast, intransitive powers do not have partner powers. E.g., a wave field manifests without interacting. (Some intransitive powers need special conditions to obtain so as to manifest, as in the case of generating a magnetic field from an electric one; but these special conditions are not the same as partner powers.)
- 12.
The point holds of two or more partner powers. I talk of two only for simplicity.
- 13.
I follow Kit Fine (1994) who has developed and argued for the Aristotelian position of modal primacy of essence over necessity.
- 14.
Compare, for instance, Schaffer (2004), p. 214: “causation has a counterfactual aspect, involving a comparative notion of difference making. I leave open whether causation is a purely counterfactual affair, or whether it involves some hybrid of counterfactuals and physical connections”. See also Schaffer (2000). What Schaffer calls ‘difference making’ is comparable to the directedness of powers as an aspect of the phenomenon of causation; for instance, the pot became hot due to the fire, and the fire was directed towards heating another (e.g. the pot).
- 15.
Eagle (2019) refers to works by himself; Luke Glynn; Carl Hoefer; Jenann Ismael; Eliot Sober.
- 16.
As, for instance, in the case of Bell’s Inequality Theorem.
- 17.
Intransitive powers which are not always manifesting may come to manifest, not by interacting, but by the obtaining of appropriate enabling conditions.
- 18.
The concept of ‘contact’ here is generic, to be interpreted by physicists, e.g., as overlap of fields.
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to this publication benefitted from a fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies (France), with the financial support of the French State, managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, programme “Investissements d’avenir”, (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+). Thanks are due to the editor of this volume, Anne Sophie Meincke, for helpful feedback on the penultimate version of the chapter.
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Marmodoro, A. (2020). Powers, Activity and Interaction. In: Meincke, A.S. (eds) Dispositionalism. Synthese Library, vol 417. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28722-1_5
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