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When you say that a thing is potentially something else, what are you saying about it? I defend a realist position according to which having potential is a matter of having a certain dispositional property. Various approaches of the metaphysics of properties and of dispositions can support the existence of potentialities. Alternatively, according to anti-realist views, saying that a thing has a potentiality is just a manner of speaking that is either strictly speaking false, or true in virtue of something other than the existence of a potentiality. An anti-realist might argue that potentiality claims reduce to claims about other sorts of entities, or that potentialities cannot be real because they have no causal powers. However, since potentialities are dispositions, reductive analyses of potentialities fare no better than reductive analyses of dispositions generally, and are equally subject to problems of masks, finks, and mimics. Furthermore, analyticity and exclusion arguments are no more effective against the causal relevance of potentialities than they are in support of the Inert Dispositions Thesis.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-024-1287-1_9

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