Potentiality

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. <p/>In contemporary philosophy potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility fragility and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her starting point but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how with this more comprehensive conception an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: (1) Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; (2) formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and (3) semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. <p/>The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects (and crucially not of possible worlds). This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean powers-based metaphysics. The aim of <em>Potentiality and Possibility</em> is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics logic and semantics.<br>