Abstract
What is it for an agent to have an ability? This was a question that occupied Aristotle, and it continues to be central to contemporary work. I begin by addressing a distinct question: under what conditions is an ‘able’-sentence true of an agent? I argue that we should answer this question—that is, give a semantics for ‘able’-sentences—in terms of options. I then argue that this is all there is to a theory of ability: an agent has an ability just in case an ‘able’-sentence is true of that agent, and the semantics for ‘able’-sentences is to be given in terms of options. Abilities are, I propose, nothing more than the linguistic reification of regularities in agents’ options.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A view that bears some similarities to the view advanced here is the semantics for ‘can’ defended in Vetter (2013).
- 2.
There is an important objection to the argument of this section that deserves careful attention. The objection is this. We should distinguish between sentences of the form ‘S is able to A’ and sentences of the form ‘S has the ability to A.’ I have been moving back and forth between these two sentences. But once we focus clearly on sentences of the form ‘S has the ability to A,’ the Ascription View may be salvaged. That is, the Ascription View might be the correct view of these sentences, even if it is false as a view of ‘able’-sentences. Indeed, I have been implicitly accepting this view in the metalanguage, in saying that the agents in question retain their abilities even in situations where they are not able to act in certain ways.
I respond to this view in Sect. 3.9. There I extend the present semantics to ‘ability’-sentences and argue, against this objection, for a unified account of ‘able’-sentences and ‘ability’-sentences. This is something that the present account, unlike the Ascription View, is in a position to deliver.
- 3.
These two conditions on the possible world describe what Kratzer (1981) terms the modal base and the ordering source, respectively.
- 4.
Note that (8) involves the past tense. This is crucial to generating the ambiguity, for consider:
-
(8a) Sasha is able to hit the bull’s eye
It is not clear that (8a) has a reading on which it is clearly true. From the fact that Sasha just hit the bull’s eye, one might argue, nothing follows from what she is now able to do. This interaction between tense and ‘able’ is something we want for our considered semantics to explain, and I will offer such an explanation in what follows.
-
- 5.
Structurally, this account parallels Bhatt (1999), which is a crucial inspiration for the present account. Bhatt rejects both the Ascription View and the Modal View. He proposes a view on which ‘able’-sentences have as their primary reading an implicative verb whose semantics are like that of ‘manage to,’ and a secondary reading in terms of a generic operator over that implicative verb. Bhatt’s view, however, fails to accommodate the breadth of ‘able’-sentences, especially those concerning acts that an agent will never (and would never) perform. In order to accommodate such sentences, we need to avail ourselves of a framework of options.
- 6.
- 7.
Since ‘able’-sentences with non-agents as their subjects are sometimes true, the present semantics calls for an account of what it is for something to be ‘considered as’ an agent, and what it is to speak of an object as if it has options. As a first pass at such an account, I propose that to assert an ‘able’-sentence about a non-agentive object is to take up what Dennett (1987) calls the ‘intentional stance’ towards that object. The metaphysical significance of the apparent attribution of abilities to mere objects will be taken up again, at greater length, in Chap. 4.
- 8.
See Portner (2009) for a thorough discussion of sentences such as (15) and the challenge that they seem to pose to standard semantic theories of ‘can.’
Bibliography
Austin, J. L. (1956). Ifs and Cans. Proceedings of the British Academy, 42, 109–132.
Bhatt, R. (1999). Covert Modality in Non-Finite Contexts. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Chomsky, N. (1970). Remarks on Nominalization. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Ginn and Company.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. MIT Press.
Gould, S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. W. W. Norton & Company.
Kratzer, A. (1981). The Notional Category of Modality. In H. J. Eikmeyer & H. Rieser (Eds.), Words, Worlds, and Contexts. De Gruyter.
Lewis, D. K. (1986). Causal Explanation. In Philosophical Papers Vol. II. Oxford University Press.
Maier, J. (2020). Abilities. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (E.N. Zalta, Ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Makin, S. (2006). Aristotle: Metaphysics Theta. Oxford University Press.
Mandelkern, M., Schultheis, G., & Boylan, D. (2017). Agentive Modals. Philosophical Review, 126(3), 301–343.
Taylor, R. (1960). I Can. Philosophical Review, 69(1), 78–89.
Vetter, B. (2013). ‘Can’ Without Possible Worlds: Semantics for Anti-Humeans. Philosophers’ Imprint, 13.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maier, J.T. (2022). The Analysis of Ability. In: Options and Agency. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10243-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10243-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-10242-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-10243-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)