Agents' Abilities

Romy Jaster

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110648652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Analytic Philosophy

Almost everyone can run. Only very few can run a marathon. But what is it for agents to be able to do things? This question, while central to many debates in philosophy, is still awaiting a comprehensive answer. The book provides just that. Drawing on some valuable insights from previous works of abilities and making use of possible world semantics, Jaster develops the "success view", a view on which abilities are a matter of successful behavior. Along the way, she explores the gradable nature of abilities, the contextsensitivity of ability statements, the difference between general and specific abilities, the relationship between abilities and dispositions, and the ability to act otherwise. The book is mandatory reading for anyone working on abilities, and provides valuable insights for anyone dealing with agents' abilities in other fields of philosophy.

For this book, Romy Jaster has received both the Wolfgang Stegmüller Prize and the De Gruyter Prize for Analytical Philosophy of Mind or Metaphysics/Ontology.

1 Methodology

Peter Morriss, in a book on power, starts his investigation with what seems to be a platitude:

Before we can start constructing an account of power we need to know what sort of thing we are dealing with: we must decide just what it is that we are trying to analyze. And we must decide, as well, how we go on about deciding that. (Morriss 2002: 2)

Why even state that platitude? Well, because, as Morriss points out,

[m]ost writers (…) pay far too little attention to these preliminary problems, with the result that they go rushing off in the wrong direction, pursuing the wrong quarry. When they eventually catch it, they may claim to have caught the beast they sought; but how do they know, if they didn't know what they were looking for? (ibid.)

What Morriss suggests here is that the debate on power suffers from a severe lack of methodological underpinnings. I am quoting him here, because as far as I can see, the same remarks apply to the literature on abilities. Methodologically, the debate is quite a mess. What is it that we are seeking to account for? How do we test whether an account captures what it is supposed to capture? What is the common ground from which we can start building competing views? These questions, while essential to the project of developing a viable understanding of abilities, do not seem to have played much of a role in the debate thus far. That is unfortunate. In fact, my guess is that the whole debate would have taken a different course had the preliminary issues been settled beforehand. Let us try and do better. Let us do some methodological groundwork before we start.

Perhaps you are inclined to think that any such project is bound to fail and that Morriss’s suggestion to specify what we are trying to analyze before going about analyzing it is up a blind alley. Isn’t this just the paradox of analysis? How are we supposed to state what we are trying to analyze if we don’t have the analysis at hand yet? Isn’t the dog chasing its own tail here?

It is not. Here is what I think we should do. First of all, let us collect a few things we know about abilities. Obviously, we don’t need to have an analysis of abilities for that. We know that dogs wag their tails when they are happy without having an analysis of doghood. In much the same way, there are a few features of abilities that I take to be beyond dispute. Those features need to be identified. This will help to get a better grip on the phenomenon we are seeking to understand and moreover will provide the basis for the entire discussion to follow.

By finding features that are essential for our understanding of abilities, we will get what we can call adequacy conditions for theories of abilities – conditions that will have to be met by any theory of abilities in order for the theory to capture its subject matter appropriately. These adequacy conditions serve as a blueprint for the critique of the most prevalent views on the market and for the development of a superior alternative. They provide test conditions along which the prospects of various potential accounts of abilities can be discussed and evaluated.

Apart from those adequacy conditions, I think we can also identify what I will call explanatory challenges for a theory of abilities. It is quite obvious upon reflection that abilities relate in interesting ways to certain other phenomena which have themselves been the subject of philosophical theorizing. An obvious challenge for a theory of abilities is to spell out how abilities relate to those other phenomena; in other words: to situate abilities in the broader theoretical landscape. While less essential to the task of formulating a viable view than the adequacy conditions, the role of the explanatory challenges must not be underestimated. Locating a phenomenon’s position in a web of other phenomena clearly helps get a more thorough grip on the phenomenon one is seeking to understand.

The adequacy conditions concern features of abilities that have to be captured, then. The explanatory challenges concern the relation of abilities to other phenomena with which they are, for some reason or other, interestingly linked. Formulating a set of each will provide us with a solid foundation from which we can start our investigation.

1.1 Adequacy condition 1: Extensional adequacy

The first thing we can note about abilities is that we know quite a bit about their distribution, so to speak. We know that virtually everyone has some abilities, for instance. We know that there are some things pretty much anyone can do, like making sounds. Yet, we also know that it is certainly not the case that anyone can do anything. There are some things no human can do, like flying faster than light. And we also know that we ourselves can do some things, while lacking the ability to do others. I know that I can play the guitar a bit, but cannot play the piano, for example. I have similar knowledge about others. I know that most people I know can swim, say, but that my grandmother cannot. This gives us a first adequacy condition for a comprehensive view of abilities:

A1.	Any comprehensive view of abilities will have to be extensionally adequate.

This adequacy condition suffices to identify some views of abilities as outright false. As Maier (2014) remarks, for instance, Aristotle discusses and rejects a view, according to which agents have the ability to do exactly what they actually do. The passage he cites is the following:

There are some (…) who say that something is capable only when it is acting, and when it is not acting is not capable. For example, someone who is not building is not capable of building, but someone who is building is capable when he is building; and likewise too in other cases.” (Makin 2006, 3, 1046b)

Aristotle rightly goes on to point out that “[i]t is not hard to see the absurd consequences of this” (ibid.). The grounds for his dismissal, I take it, is the adequacy condition I am suggesting; a view of abilities can only succeed if it is extensionally adequate.

What exactly does extensional adequacy amount to? We have to be careful not to misinterpret this condition. A very common misinterpretation would be to think that we need to have a clear and complete grasp of the extension of “ability” in order to be able to judge whether or not a view of ability is extensionally adequate. If this were so, one might reasonably doubt that the extensional adequacy of a view could ever be settled. For, arguably, we do not have such a clear and complete grasp of the concept of ability, or any other concept, for that matter. With respect to some of our ideas about abilities and some of our particular judgments about whether or not an agent in such and such a condition has an ability to ϕ, we may well be mistaken. Disagreement can be taken as an indicator here: whenever people disagree and the disagreement is not merely verbal, one of them has to be wrong. Apart from our misjudgments, there may be a grey area of cases to which our concept of ability may or may not apply. Having a concept need not necessarily imply that it be sharp enough to cover every single case. Philosophical theorizing may be partly normative: systematizing our thinking about a subject matter will often give us a reason for a particular sharpening of the concept within the grey areas.

What does extensional adequacy amount to, then? To three conditions: the clear cases of an agent having an ability have to be covered; the clear cases of an agent lacking an ability have to be excluded; and absurd consequences have to be avoided. This can be done without having a clear and complete grasp of the concept involved. All that is required is that we have a clear grasp on the applicability of the concept to some cases. I think we can confidently say that this condition is met in the case of abilities.

The first adequacy condition is not peculiar to a view about abilities. Extensional adequacy is a standard that any philosophical theory of any subject matter whatsoever will have to live up to. Let us now move on to adequacy conditions that emerge specifically in connection with abilities.

1.2 Adequacy condition 2: General and specific abilities

Throughout the literature on abilities, it is taken for granted that there are two different types of abilities. There are what we can call “general abilities” on the one hand, and “specific abilities” on the other.¹ Intuitively, the distinction is well-taken and the examples used in order to illustrate it all exhibit the same basic structure. Yet there is little systematicity in the way the distinction is being drawn; a lot of the pertinent ideas on the issue are implicit, rather than explicit, in people’s writings, and many ideas surrounding the distinction are highly contested. In what follows, I will try and identify the core idea of the distinction. Later on in this book (→ 4.5), we’ll turn to the more controversial issues and see how several ideas about general and specific abilities that float around in the literature relate.

The distinction between general and specific abilities is usually introduced by way of examples. Maier, for instance, asks us to

[c]onsider a well-trained tennis player equipped with ball and racquet, standing at the service line. There is, as it were, nothing standing between him and a serve: every prerequisite for his serving has been met. Such an agent (…) has the specific ability to serve. In contrast, consider an otherwise similar tennis player who lacks a racquet and ball, and is miles away from a tennis court. There is clearly a good sense in which such an agent has the ability to hit a serve: he has been trained to do so, and has done so many times in the past. Yet such an agent lacks the specific ability to serve (…). Let us say that such an agent has the general ability to serve. (Maier 2014, 1.3)

Essentially along the same lines, Vihvelin points out that

‘ability’ is used in two different ways. Does someone with a broken leg have the ability to ride a bike? That depends. Speaking one way, we might agree that she has the ability. (She took lessons, she knows how; she has the necessary skills and competence.) Speaking another way, we might deny that she has the ability. (Her leg is broken; her bike-riding skills are temporarily impaired). (Vihvelin 2004: 448, fn.3).

Intuitively, the distinction emphasized in these two passages is clear enough. The point is simply that when we ask whether some agent has the ability to serve, for example, the answer may vary, depending on the sense of “ability” we have in mind. When we think about an agent’s general abilities, we abstract away from the agent’s present situation a great deal. It does not matter whether the agent lacks a racquet, or has a broken leg, etc. Thus, in the general sense of “ability”,

Walter may have the ability to walk even though he is bound to a chair. Sally may have the ability to sing even though she freezes whenever her Aunt is present. Chip may have the ability to cook even though no cooking equipment is available to him now. (Whittle 2010: 2)

More generally put, “[a]n individual with [a general] ability may be unable to exercise it in a particular case because a temporary obstacle is present” (Berofsky 2002: 196). As you can tell from these statements, there is a core understanding of general abilities, which is voiced over and over again by writers across the board: unfavorable temporary circumstances do not rob us of our general abilities.

Specific abilities are different. When we are interested in an agent’s specific abilities, we do not abstract away from the agent’s actual situation. If the agent has a broken leg or lacks a racquet, then this deprives her of the specific ability to ride a bike and play tennis, respectively. In the specific sense of “ability”, one is unable to walk when tied up, to sing when nervous to the point of freezing, and to cook without any equipment at hand.

When people move away from particular examples and try to give a more general account of the distinction between general and specific abilities, they usually do so in much the same way in which I have framed the distinction in the last paragraph. Thus, Mele points out that

a general practical ability (…) is the kind of ability to A that we attribute to agents even though we know they have no opportunity to A at the time of attribution and we have no specific occasion for their A-ing in mind. (…) [A] specific practical ability [is] an ability an agent has at a time to A then or on some specified later occasion. (Mele 2003: 447)

In very much the same spirit, Whittle distinguishes between “what an agent is able to do in a large range of circumstances, and what the agent is able to do now, in some particular circumstances” (Whittle 2010: 2). And again in similar terms, Vetter points out that general abilities are “retained through great changes in circumstances” (Vetter, ms.) and calls this feature the robustness of such abilities. What seems to be common ground, then, is that the having of a general ability is largely independent of particular features of the agent's situation, while the having of a specific ability is not.²

Note, by the way, that often no explicit distinction is made between a lack of opportunity and unfavorable internal features of the agent when philosophers think about factors that deprive an agent of a specific ability. The lack of a specific ability which Maier envisages involves the lack of a racquet and a ball and being absent from a tennis court. This looks very much like a lack of opportunity to play tennis. Vihvelin, in contrast, notes cases in which the agent’s leg is broken or her bike-riding skills are temporarily impaired. These look more like unfavorable internal features of the agent in virtue of which the agent cannot ride her bike ...