Abstract
According to a well-known argument, originally due to David Armstrong, powers theory is objectionable, as it leads to a ‘Meinongian’ ontology on which some entities are real but do not actually exist. I argue here that the right conclusion to draw from this argument has thus far not been identified and that doing so has significant implications for powers theory. Specifically, I argue that the key consequence of the argument is that it provides substantial grounds for trope powers theorists, but not other powers theorists, to accept one version of the view that properties are powerful qualities. In particular, they have grounds to favour the view that powerful properties are properties with exclusively qualitative natures that ground modal facts.
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Notes
Subsequent versions of this argument have been given by Handfield (2005), Bird (2007) and Tugby (2013), who each relate their argument to Armstrong’s argument in a different way. Handfield explicitly formulates his argument as an interpretation of Armstrong’s argument. Bird begins his presentation of his argument by invoking Armstrong’s argument but states that he does not intend to ascribe his argument to Armstrong. Tugby, in turn, merely notes in passing that Armstrong gives a similar argument. .
Well-known versions of this sort of view include Harré and Madden (1975), Shoemaker (1980), Swoyer (1982), Ellis and Lierse (1994), Ellis (2001, 2002), Molnar (2003), Heil (2003), Mumford (2004), Bird (2007), Chakravartty (2007), Whittle (2008), Martin (2008), Mumford and Anjum (2011) and Jacobs (2011).
This usage is in line with Armstrong’s (2002: 168–169) discussion of Ellis’s (2001) response to the argument from non-manifestation. There Armstrong (2002: 169) says: ‘There is one particular manifestation of the power that is actually manifested in a particular situation, but a huge number of manifestations of that power will be empirically possible yet never occur. The power in the particulars points to all of these.’ As Armstrong points out, this result seems to exacerbate the difficulties raised by the argument from non-manifestation, as it apparently has the implication that token powers are generally unmanifested many times over.
Tugby (2013: 460) raises this sort of objection to attempts to deny that directedness is a genuine relation.
Strictly speaking, this result only follows if the token manifestation of an unmanifested power instance is possible, and it is not immediately obvious that no unmanifested power instances have impossible token manifestations. Jenkins and Nolan (2012), for instance, argue that some actual dispositions cannot, in fact, manifest. I ignore this complication here, because the sorts of unmanifested power tokens with which I am concerned, such as unmanifested instances of charge, generally have possible manifestations.
I am grateful to a referee for Erkenntnis for pressing this point. Handfield (2005: 455–456), drawing on an argument by Smith and Stoljar (1998), also points out that conjoining dispositional essentialism with a possible worlds account of counterfactuals, in general, seems to require the ‘existence of an external similarity relation’ between worlds. If good sense could be made of such a relation, then the possible worlds account of counterfactuals could be conjoined with the counterfactual-grounding conception of powers by claiming that powers have qualitative natures that ground such relations. .
I would like to thank a referee for Erkenntnis for raising this point. A similar point is also made by Jaag (2014: 18) in the course of discussing Tugby’s theory.
Mumford and Anjum (2011) provide a well-known and detailed defence of a version of primitive dispositional modality. It is not clear, though, that their approach would be helpful in developing the position currently under consideration, as they often appear to conceive of dispositions as being constituted by a connection to their manifestations. The position under consideration, on the other hand, requires that dispositions are modal facts that may involve the possibilities of their manifestations but are not constituted by any connection to their manifestations.
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Acknowledgements
This article is partly based on work that I did for my PhD thesis at the University of the Witwatersrand. I would like to thank the philosophy department and my supervisor, David Martens, for their assistance and support while writing the thesis. I would also like to thank referees for Erkenntnis for unusually extensive and helpful comments that substantially improved the paper.
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Coates, A. Tropes, Unmanifested Dispositions and Powerful Qualities. Erkenn 87, 2143–2160 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00295-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00295-4