Pure Powers Are Not Powerful Qualities

Abstract

There is no consensus on the most adequate conception of the fundamental properties of our world. The pure powers view and the identity theory of powerful qualities claim to be promising alternatives to categoricalism, the view that all fundamental properties essentially contribute to the qualitative make-up of things that have them. The pure powers view holds that fundamental properties essentially empower things that have them with a distinctive causal profile. On the identity theory, fundamental properties are dispositional as well as qualitative, or powerful qualities. Despite the manifest difference, Taylor (2018) argues that pure powers and powerful qualities collapse into the same ontology. If this collapse objection were sound, the debate between the pure powers view and the identity theory of powerful qualities would be illusory: these views could claim the same advantages and would suffer the same problems. Here I defend an ontologically robust distinction between pure powers and powerful qualities. To accomplish this aim, I show that the collapse between pure powers and powerful qualities can be resisted. I conclude by drawing some positive implications of this result.

Dispositions and Powers

“…2). There is also an open debate over whether the identity view just collapses back into dispositional essentialism (Giannotti 2021a(Giannotti , 2021bTaylor 2018Taylor , 2022. Given that the grounding view seems to be able to claim these advantages over the identity view while avoiding its drawbacks, and due to limitations of space, we will say no more about powerful qualities/the identity view.…”

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).…”

“…It is not easy to find a clear-cut definition of what, exactly, friends of PQ take these qualities to be nor how exactly the thesis is to be spelled out coherently (Taylor, 2018). For example, some suggest that properties have two aspects (Giannotti, 2019(Giannotti, , 2021 or are dual-sided, 'Janus-faced' (Martin, 1994), while others insist that qualitatively and dispositionality are one and the same thing: As Heil puts it, 'P's dispositionality, Pd, is P's qualitativity, Pq, and each of these is P: Pd = Pq = P' (2003,111).…”