The Regress of Pure Powers Revisited

Abstract

The paper aims to elucidate in better detail than before the dispute about whether or not dispositional monism—the view that all basic properties are pure powers—entails a vicious infinite regress. Particular focus is on Alexander Bird's and George Molnar's attempts to show that the arguments professing to demonstrate a vicious regress are inconclusive because they presuppose what they aim to prove, notably that powers are for their nature dependent on something else. I argue that Bird and Molnar are mistaken. It is true that dispositional monism is popularly assumed to characterize powers as dependent entities, but this is not what the arguments aim to prove. They merely aim to demonstrate that it would be absurd to assume that all properties are dependent in this way. Finally, it is argued that there is an unresolved tension in Bird's and Molnar's accounts of powers. They characterize them as being for their nature dependent on the manifestations that they are for, and yet ontologically independent of those same manifestations. Until that tension is resolved, their accounts are not equipped to remove the threat of vicious regress.

New powers for Dispositionalism

“…The second general worry concerns the compatibility of my proposal with the view that powers have their identity determined relationally. The objection, as I understand it, runs as follows: a commonly accepted solution to the "identity regress" (Lowe 2010;Ingthorsson 2015) is that that the identity of powers is determined holistically by their directedness network (Bird 2007a, b;Tugby 2017;Williams 2010Williams , 2019. This either involves only their manifestations (Vetter 2015) or both manifestations and stimuli (Bird 2007a, b).…”

“…Overall, I do not think this is a cost of the theory. Bird's structuralist view, however popular, is not without its critics and its problems (Barker 2009;Oderberg 2011Oderberg , 2012Ingthorsson 2015;Tugby 2017, Williams 2019 and is not the only way to cash out the idea that the identity of powers is relational and that their modal profile is essential and fixed. This modifies the trade-off invoked by the objection: my theory is not incompatible with the idea that the identity of powers is a relational affair, but rather with one particular way of cashing out that idea, namely Bird's structuralist solution.…”

“…Obviously, we have to exclude negative properties in order for this characterisation to work; my merely possible granddaughter is not tall because she lacks the property of being tall, and not because he has the (negative) property of being not-tall.16 This conclusion would perhaps vindicateArmstrong's (1997, p. 80) 'Reality Regress'(Ingthorsson 2015) against pure powers, nicely summed up by the dictum 'Always Packing, Never Travelling'.…”

Properties: Qualities, Powers, or Both?

“…A monism of that kind is thought to invite the image of an infinite series of properties that have no nature on their own except for a connection to something else that is equally lacking in any independent nature. This difficulty is now popularly known as the Regress of Pure Powers and has been advanced in different forms by a cadre of philosophers (for discussions, see Bird 2007b; Engelhard ; Ingthorsson, forthcoming). I will not discuss that problem here but instead focus on purist and mixed attempts to argue that powers do bestow on their bearers a nature that is in some sense independent of the manifestation property and that, therefore, some form of dispositional monism is viable.…”

Dispositions manifest themselves: an identity theory of properties

“…I takeBarker and Smart (2012) as critical representatives of the view; among others areEngelhard (2010),Ingthorsson (2015),Livanios (2017), pp. 31-54;Taylor (2018).…”