Episode 115: Abilities with Barbara Vetter

Barbara Vetter's Potentiality offers an Aristotelian-inspired alternative to possible-worlds accounts of modality by developing a framework based on dispositions, powers, and potentialities. The book argues that modal facts can be understood in terms of real tendencies and capacities instantiated in the world, updating classical ideas with contemporary debates in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Vetter examines how dispositions and causal powers can ground modal claims while interacting with laws of nature and modal semantics. She also addresses challenges from modern modal logic and evaluates how potentiality-based accounts can accommodate standard modal notions like possibility and necessity. The work is influential in recent discussions about grounding modality in concrete features of the world rather than abstract possible-world semantics.