Abstract
The previous chapter argued for an account of abilities in terms of options. Several recent authors have proposed a different account, on which abilities are understood as a kind of disposition. I explain why such accounts are mistaken. I then propose that an inverse position may be more promising: the dispositions and affordances of objects may be understood in terms of agents’ abilities. I connect this proposal to the behavior of grammatical voice, as well as to the traditional distinction between active and passive powers. That distinction is often elided in contemporary work, but it provides, on the present view, an apt way of understanding the metaphysics of power.
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Notes
- 1.
A notable exception are attempts to analyze causation in agentive terms, of the kind defended in Menzies and Price (1993).
- 2.
- 3.
This is simply an instance of a point already emphasized, namely that an agent may retain the ability to perform an act even at times when that act is not an option.
- 4.
A different approach would be to allow for dispositions to lack stimulus conditions, and to modal abilities on dispositions that are monadic in this way. Although Fara (2005) endorses precisely this possibility in the case of dispositions, it is not one that he or other advocates of a dispositional analysis pursue in their accounts of ability.
- 5.
See again Clarke (2009) for a careful adjudication of these responses and whether they succeed.
- 6.
For a discussion of some of the open empirical debates that bear on this question, see Dickinson (2011).
- 7.
On the distinctive roles of resolution, see Holton (2004).
- 8.
As I have already argued in Chap. 3, we should in the end be skeptical of the idea that there is even such a thing as ability, properly speaking. An account of ability should be replaced by an account of ‘able’-sentences, which gives an account of their truth conditions without any appeal to abilities at all. But the objections brought against dispositionalism here arise even granting the assumption that there are such things as abilities.
- 9.
In the contemporary literature on dispositions, authors often appeal to locutions such as ‘The glass is disposed to break when struck’ in lieu of predicates like those used in the text. See Maier (2015) for a discussion of these locutions and how they are related to the dispositional predicates that are more common in ordinary speech and that will be the focus here.
- 10.
Sometimes historical phonetic pressures will lead to the modification of this suffix, for example in ‘fragile’ which takes an ‘-le’ suffix.
- 11.
Compare Goodman (1955), who famously introduces the topic of dispositions as follows: ‘Besides the observable properties it exhibits and the actual processes it undergoes, a thing is full of threats and promises’ (p. 40). This language suggests a thesis that I will elaborate in what follows: that Gibson and Goodman are approaching, by different routes and under different names, something like a single phenomenon.
- 12.
On the extension of affordances to the interpersonal case, see Brancazio (2020).
- 13.
Pseudo-activity corresponds to what Maier (2015) calls ‘ergativity.’ Following the approach developed there, we can give a formal criterion for pseudo-activity as follows. A verb V is pseudo-active just in case ‘S V’s x’ implies ‘x V’s.’ For instance, ‘Sam breaks the glass’ implies ‘The glass breaks,’ whereas ‘Sam paints the glass’ does not imply ‘The glass paints.’
- 14.
A predicate is semantically associated with a verb, I will say, just in case the truth-conditions for the applicability of that predicate are best stated in terms of that verb. For instance, the best statement of the conditions under which an object is flammable will invoke the verb ‘burn.’
- 15.
Invoking again our formal criterion, ‘burn’ is pseudo-agentive because ‘Sam burns the blanket’ implies ‘The blanket burns.’
- 16.
On the close connection between dispositions and ‘easily,’ see Vetter (2014).
- 17.
If we wished, we could add a third condition that specifically demanded that the predicate not be semantically associated with a pseudo-agentive verb. That condition would construe affordances more narrowly, in accord with common usage, and would exclude—by fiat—properties like fragility from the class of affordances. I prefer the broader and more principled account given in the text, as it recognizes dispositions as a special case of affordances.
- 18.
A locus classicus for this distinction, in the early modern tradition, is the following passage from Locke: Thus we say, Fire has a power to melt gold, i.e. to destroy the consistency of its insensible parts, and consequently its hardness, and make it fluid; and gold has a power to be melted; that the sun has a power to blanch wax, and wax a power to be blanched by the sun … Power thus considered is two-fold, viz. as able to make, or able to receive any change. The one may be called active, and the other passive power. (Locke, 1690/1996)
- 19.
Such cases are due to Martin (1994). Strictly speaking, in Martin’s nomenclature, the following case is a case of ‘reverse finking.’
- 20.
An exception is Fara (2005), and his distinction between ‘entrenched’ and ‘transient’ finkishness.
- 21.
See Levin (2000) for a discussion of this and other criticisms that have been brought against the dispositional analysis of color.
- 22.
It bears comparing this schematic view to the ecological theory of color proposed in Thompson et al. (1992).
- 23.
- 24.
This connection should be understood against the background of the extensive connections between dispositions and causation more broadly, surveyed in Handfield (2009).
- 25.
This somewhat awkward phrasing reveals the difficulty of even stating the dispositional analysis of mind within the framework of a pragmatic theory of dispositions. Some will be inclined to take this as evidence against the pragmatic theory. As will become clear presently, I am inclined to take it instead as evidence against the dispositional analysis. That analysis can only be formulated in terms of dispositions that are quite different from canonical instances such as fragility and flammability.
- 26.
Note that this kind of objection, if sound, is an objection to the dispositional analysis of belief generally, whether or not we adopt the pragmatic account of dispositions.
- 27.
Close to being circular, but not quite. As argued in Chap. 3, claims about what an agent is able to do typically designate her options, and options are distinct from abilities. So one might in principle have an account on which dispositions are analyzed partly in terms of options, and abilities are themselves analyzed in terms of dispositions. That is not the kind of account, however, that we should in the end favor.
- 28.
Agents might also have passive powers as well. Assuming that some agents are material beings, they may be fragile or flammable just as mere objects are. By the same token, agents may be objects as well. But they are also agents. This is why I refer to objects that are not agents as ‘mere’ objects—that is, objects that are objects and nothing else.
- 29.
It can’t be denied that back when languages were first being formed men were poorly equipped to carry out successfully this investigation into causes. We see that the experience of thousands of years has been needed for men to get onto the right track in this investigation—if indeed they can be said to be on it even now. By thinking about it we can conjecture, and through experience we can see, that primitive people in their impatient and unskillful judgments make innumerable errors about causes. This shows that if it were the case (as I say it is) that active verbs were originally intended to express what is properly called ‘action,’ and their nominative nouns were intended to stand for the agent of the action, still, in the primitive and barbarous state of affairs when languages were coming into existence there must have been innumerable misapplications of such verbs and nominative nouns, with many things spoken of as active though they had no real activity. (Reid, 1788/2011, 1.2)
- 30.
In Chap. 3 we considered giving these attributions a deflationary reading. Reid’s proposal is more radical: it proposes that these attributes are simply false, and proposes a genealogical explanation of how these false claims entered our discourse about objects.
- 31.
Note that while passive powers are often disguised as active ones, active powers are seldom if ever disguised as active ones. So far as I know, this question has not been raised in the previous literature, and remains open.
- 32.
Note that this agent will often be a hypothetical one, as there will often be no actual agent in the vicinity of a fragile glass. The consideration of hypothetical agents appears to be something with which we have some implicit facility. It comes into play, for instance, whenever we evaluate sentences such as: ‘One can travel to New York by train.’
- 33.
To some degree this is simply a question of the rhetoric that one favors. I would say about this view of dispositions something like what, mutatis mutandis, David Lewis says about his own theory of value: What to make of the situation is mainly a matter of temperament. You can bang the drum about how philosophy has uncovered a terrible secret: there are no values … Or you can think it better for public safety to keep quiet and hope people will go on as before. Or you can declare that there are no values, but that nevertheless it is legitimate-and not just expedient-for us to carry on with value-talk, since we can make it all go smoothly if we just give the name of value to claimants that don’t quite deserve it … Or you can think it an empty question whether there are values: say what you please, speak strictly or loosely. When it comes to deserving a name, there’s better and worse but who’s to say how good is good enough? Or you can think it clear that the imperfect deservers of the name are good enough, but only just, and say that although there are values we are still terribly wrong about them. Or you can calmly say that value (like simultaneity) is not quite as some of us sometimes thought. Myself, I prefer the calm and conservative responses. But so far as the analysis of value goes, they’re all much of a muchness. (Smith et al., 1989, p. 137)
- 34.
Prior et al. (1982) is a standard articulation of this argument.
- 35.
Enoch (2013) suggests that we distinguish explanatory indispensability from deliberative indispensability. Earlier I argue that options might be regarded as deliberatively indispensable. The arguments of this section suggest that this proposal might be extended, and that the various properties that depend on options—such as the passive powers—might be regarded as deliberatively indispensable as well.
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Maier, J.T. (2022). The Active and Passive Powers. In: Options and Agency. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10243-1_4
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