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Not so Powerful Pure Powers

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  • Joaquim Giannotti
Joaquim Giannotti
Núcleo de Ciencias Sociales y Artes, Universidad Mayor, Santiago, Chile / African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1247

Published 2026-04-08

Keywords

  • Pure Powers,
  • Qualitativity,
  • Dispositionality,
  • Powerful Qualities,
  • Aspects
  • Poderes puros,
  • Cualitatividad,
  • Disposicionalidad,
  • Cualidades poderosas,
  • Aspectos
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Abstract

Pure powers ontologies hold that all or many fundamental natural properties are completely powerful. Their nature is exhausted by the various causal, dispositional, and nomic roles they play. I discuss an underappreciated challenge against the pure powers view based on considerations from physics: How can we harmonise the complete powerfulness thesis and the manifest qualitatively structural, geometrical, and mathematical character of physical properties? I identify and assay five approaches that could answer this question: (i) eliminativism, (ii), the identity view, (iii) emergentism, (iv) essentialism, and (v) prioritarianism. Any satisfactory answer to the challenge should preserve the primacy of the powerful over the qualitative, and it should avoid collapsing the pure powers view into one of its competitors. I argue that each of (i) – (v) either fails to meet such desiderata or raises new problems for the pure powers view.

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