The Regress of Pure Powers Revisited

What is it about?

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 characterise 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 account of powers. They characterise 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.

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Why is it important?

The paper qualifies the debate on the regress or pure powers in three ways. First, by pointing out that those who have defended dispositional monism against the various regresses that critics have brought forward, have misconstrued the original purpose of the regress arguments. The regress arguments do not try to show that dispositions are dependent entities, but rather try to show that a regress follows if they are assumed to be dependent. Second, it reveals a problem with Bird and Molnar's characterisation of dispositions as independent, showing that further work needs to be done to establish them as truly independent. Third, the paper shows that the different types of regresses that have been put forward are not really independent of each other; they arguably derive from one basic kind of regress here called the nature regress.

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