The Potentiality Universality Principle and Feinberg’s “Logical Point”

I have already introduced PIP, PEP, and PAP as three principles governing potentiality in the precise sense relevant to the Potentiality Argument. Now I introduce a fourth principle for your inspection which I will call the Potentiality Universality Principle:

PUP: Necessarily, if a normal F has the potentiality to become a G, then every normal F has the potentiality to become a G.

To revert to the hackneyed example, if an acorn is a potential oak tree, then every normal acorn is a potential oak tree, and this is so as a matter of natural necessity. It cannot be the case that some normal acorns have, while others do not have, the potentiality to become oak trees. Potentialities are inherent in the things that have them. They are not a matter of ascription. We don't ascribe potentialities; things have them regardless of our mental and linguistic performances. And these very performances themselves realize potentialities. So if the potentialities of the ascribing mind were themselves ascribed, who or what would do the ascribing? I cannot ascribe potentialities to myself if the ascribing is itself the realization of my potentiality to ascribe.

An ascriptivist theory of potentiality would be as absurd as Dennett's ascriptivist theory of intentionality.

Similarly with dispositions. To say of a sugar cube that it is water-soluble is to say that, were it placed in water, it would dissolve. Now if this is true of one normal sugar cube, it is true of all normal sugar cubes. Suppose you have 100 sugar cubes, all alike. There would be no reason to say that some of them are water-soluble and some are not. If one is, all are. If one is not, none are. Thus what we might call the Dispositionality Universality Principle:

DUP: Necessarily, if a normal F is disposed to X, then every normal F is disposed to X.

Now we turn from the realm of nature to that of convention.

As a presidential candidate, John McCain has a right to certain federal funds. But when he was languishing in the 'Hanoi Hilton' he did not have the right to those funds. Now someone might get it into his head to say that McCain in Hanoi was a potential presidential candidate, and then argue like this:

Since McCain in Hanoi did not have the right to federal funds, and since McCain in Hanoi was a potential presidential candidate, it follows that a thing's being a potential possessor of qualifications for a certain moral or legal status S does not entail its being an actual possessor of qualifications for status S.

This is essentially Joel Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality." It is doubly flawed. One of the flaws I discussed earlier. Now I focus on the other flaw, namely, the violation of PUP above. If an F has the potentiality to become a G, then every normal F has the potentiality to become a G. Now in the McCain case, no matter what you plug in for 'F,' it will not be the case that every normal F has the potential to become a presidential candidate. It is simply false to say that McCain in Hanoi was a potential presidential canduidate in the relevant sense of 'potential.'

Let 'F' stand for U. S. citizen. Does every U.S. citizen have the potential to become a presidential candidate? Obviously not: it is is simply false that every normal U. S. citizen develops in the normal course of events into a presidential candidate. A potentiality is a naturally inherent nisus — and as natural not a matter of laws or other conventions — which is the same in all members of the class in question. But the opportunity to run for president has nothing natural about it: it is an artifact of our contingent laws and political arrangements. People like McCain do not become presidential contenders in the way acorns become oak trees. The Feinberg objection confuses nature and convention.

So I arrive once again and by a different route at the old conclusion: Feinberg's logical point is sired by a total misunderstanding of the notion of potentiality in play in the Potentiality Argument.