⁂ Concepts · Being · No. 18
Potentiality

Svalbard: a million capacities stored at minus eighteen degrees, most never to be exercised.

Potentiality

A real capacity to become or to act, present in a thing while it is not being exercised.

Theme
Being and reality
Tradition
Greek
Term
δύναμις · dunamis
Term fixed
c. 330 BC

In plain terms

A glass on a table is fragile. It is not breaking, and it may never break, and it might be melted down having never broken. Yet fragility is a fact about it now - it is why it is packed in tissue and why insurers price it as they do.

Potentiality is the name for that kind of fact: something a thing can do or become, real while nothing is happening. The difficulty is saying what such a fact consists in. It cannot be what does happen, since nothing is happening. It cannot be what will happen, since the glass may last forever.

And the alternative - that it just means if it were struck it would break - runs into trouble quickly, because it is not hard to describe a glass that would not break when struck while being fragile all the same.

As a philosopher would put it

Aristotle's dunamis is introduced to make change intelligible: what comes to be was already there potentially, so becoming does not require something arising from nothing. It is not mere logical possibility but a real state of an actual thing, and it comes in two directions - the active power to do and the passive capacity to undergo.

The modern successor is the debate about dispositions. The conditional analysis - fragile means would break if struck - is elegant and has known counterexamples: the finkish case, where the striking itself removes the disposition, and the masked case, where packing prevents the breaking without making the glass any less fragile. Both suggest the disposition is a real property rather than a shorthand for a conditional.

The question then becomes whether dispositions are grounded in categorical properties - microstructure, on which fragility is the arrangement of the glass and the conditional is a consequence - or whether some properties are irreducibly dispositional, so that being negatively charged just is a set of powers with no categorical base underneath.

Where you meet it

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds more than a million distinct seed samples inside a mountain on Spitsbergen, at minus eighteen degrees, 130 metres above sea level and well inside the permafrost. It is not a research collection and it is not a gene bank in daily use. It is a backup.

The seeds are not growing. Almost all of them never will - the vault exists so that they need not be planted, and a withdrawal is a sign that something has gone wrong somewhere. There has been one, in 2015, when the Aleppo bank was destroyed by the Syrian war and duplicates were withdrawn, grown out, and redeposited.

What is being stored, at considerable expense, is capacity: the ability of a particular barley to grow in a particular drought that has not happened yet. That capacity is either a present fact about those seeds or it is nothing, and the entire institution is built on the first answer. Viability testing measures it directly, which is a capacity being checked without being exercised.

What is actually disputed

Whether potentialities are real features or convenient shorthand.

The deflationary view is that the only real properties are the categorical ones - the actual microstructure - and that dispositional talk is a summary of what such structures do under conditions. On this account potentiality is a way of speaking, and the seventeenth century was right to drop it.

Dispositional realists reply that the conditional analysis has never been repaired despite fifty years of attempts, and that fundamental physics describes its objects almost entirely in terms of powers: mass, charge and spin are specified by what they do, and no categorical description underneath them has ever been produced. If that is right, then some potentialities are irreducible and the Aristotelian half of the pair survives its own funeral.

Commonly confused with

  • Possibility c. 330 BC Possibility is about what could be the case, anywhere. Potentiality is a present state of a particular actual thing, and most possibilities correspond to no potentiality in anything.
  • potential in physics Potential energy is a quantity assigned to a configuration. Potentiality is a capacity a thing has, and the two are related only by an etymology.
  • promise or talent The everyday sense evaluates someone against a hoped-for outcome. The technical sense is neutral - a thing has as much potentiality to rot as to ripen.

Defined against

  • Actuality The correlative term, and Aristotle's claim is that this one is always defined by reference to it

Philosophers

  • Aristotle Real capacity as the answer to how change is possible
  • Thomas Aquinas Potency and act carried into an account of creation and of God
  • Avicenna Potentiality joined to the analysis of contingent existence
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Force as a real property of substances, against the purely geometrical account

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Actuality c. 330 BC · Possibility c. 330 BC · Matter c. 330 BC · Becoming c. 500 BC · Causation c. 330 BC

Aristotle's dunamis covers both the power to act on something and the capacity to be acted on, and the double sense is deliberate rather than a looseness in the term.