Making sense of powerful qualities

Abstract

According to the powerful qualities view, properties are both powerful and qualitative. Indeed, on this view the powerfulness of a property is identical to its qualitativity. Proponents claim that this view provides an attractive alternative to both the view that properties are pure powers and the view that they are pure qualities. It remains unclear, however, whether the claimed identity between powerfulness and qualitativity can be made coherent in a way that allows the powerful qualities view to constitute this sort of alternative. I argue here that this can be done, given a particular conception of both the qualitativity and powerfulness of properties. On this conception, a property is qualitative just in the sense that its essence is fixed independently of any distinct properties, and it is powerful just if its essence grounds its dispositional role.

Powers and the hard problem of consciousness: conceivability, possibility and powers

“…Fortunately, the matter is somewhat tangential to the arguments of this paper since it suffices for my purposes that powerful qualities theories interact with the conceivability argument in the same way as Russellian Monist theories, and this will be true of any theory in which the qualitativity of a property is necessarily bound to, or is identical with, what it can do. 11 The most popular account is the identity thesis which regards qualities as identical to powers (Martin & Heil, 1999, p .47;Heil, 2003, p. 111;Heil, 2012;Martin, 2007;Strawson, 2008;Jacobs, 2011;Taylor, 2013;Carruth, 2016;Coates, 2020), but one might also regard qualitativity and powerfulness to be aspects of properties (Giannotti, 2019, who also examines different ways of understanding the identity claim), consider properties to be compounds of qualitativity and powerfulness (Taylor, 2018), or postulate another relation between the two. (The differences between these options need not delay us here.)…”

Relational Troubles Structuralist Worries for an Epistemology of Powers-Based Modality

“…Proponents of the Powerful Qualities (PQ) view, on the other hand, maintain that properties are both dispositional and qualitative (e.g. Martin, 1997;Martin & Heil, 1999;Heil, 2003;Martin, 2008;Jacobs, 2010;Williams, 2019;Giannotti, 2021;Coates, 2021).…”

Grounding theories of powers

“…250-251) Contessa (2019, Sect. 6) and Coates (2020) have discussed specific theories that might qualify as grounding theories in one way or another. However, as far as I know, this is the first paper to offer a detailed systematic analysis of the different grounding and dependence theories that are available.…”

“…In a recent paper,Coates (2020) also articulates the powerful qualities theory in terms of grounding and argues that this allows the powerful qualities theorists to distinguish themselves from pure powers theorists (contra Taylor 2018). Coates's article was published online when this paper was in the final stages of publication and I am not able to give it the attention it deserves.…”