Essence, Potentiality, and Modality

Abstract

According to essentialism, metaphysical modality is founded in the essences of things, where the essence of a thing is roughly akin to its real definition. According to potentialism (also known as dispositionalism), metaphysical modality is founded in the potentialities of things, where a potentiality is roughly the generalized notion of a disposition. Essentialism and potentialism have much in common, but little has been written about their relation to each other. The aim of this paper is to understand better the relations between essence and potentiality, on the one hand, and between essentialism and potentialism, on the other. It is argued, first, that essence and potentiality are not duals but interestingly linked by a weaker relation dubbed ‘semi-duality’; second, that given this weaker relation, essentialism and potentialism are not natural allies but rather natural competitors; and third, that the semi-duality of essence and potentiality allows the potentialist to respond to an important explanatory challenge by using essentialist resources without thereby committing to essentialism.

Essence and Necessity

“…I argue that some of the reductive hypotheses fare better than their non-reductive rivals: they are simpler, more natural, and more systematic. Specifically, I argue that one candidate reduction, according to which metaphysical necessity is truth in virtue of the nature of all propositions, is superior to the others, including the one proposed by Fine (1994), according to which metaphysical necessity is truth in virtue of the nature reducibility of necessity to essence, see e.g., Hale (1996Hale ( , 2002, Correia (2006Correia ( , 2012, Cameron (2010), Vetter (2011Vetter ( , 2020, Wildman (2018), Teitel (2019) and Ditter (2020). A non-reductive essentialist account of modality is defended in Hale (2013).…”

Modality

“…Vetter (2015, Ch. 3) offers the core of her positive account of dispositions, which, as 58 See Borghini and Williams (2008) and Jacobs (2010). 59 Vetter also identifies actualism as a trait of Finean essentialism (Vetter 2021). And she is right that, in intent, they might all be so.…”

“…account of metaphysical modality. There are other thorough dispositionalist theories of modality, 58 but what makes Vetter's especially salient for our purposes is not just the positive view per se, developed in Vetter (2015) and refined in Vetter (2021), but also the comparative criticism against the Essentialist Views contained in the latter piece.…”

Extended Dispositionalism and Determinism

“…Dispositionalists with respect to metaphysical modality might adopt a primitive non-modal notion of essence. Vetter (2021) has recently argued that such a notion of essence cannot be understood in terms of dispositions. Still, she argues that essences constrain dispositions (in the sense that nothing can have a disposition that goes against its essence) and that this allows to explain the necessity of essence.…”