uing that agents’ abilities are, or are not, compatible with the possibility of determinism. This is a question we touched on briefly in Section 5.1. As noted there, the new dispositionalists are motivated, in part, by the project of arguing for compatibilism. In contrast, Steward is explicitly concerned to defend incompatibilism. (Vetter appears to be neutral on this question.) The question of how the analysis of ability bears on the free will debates looms over many of these discussions, and we will confront it directly and at some length below in Section 6.
Still other approaches to ability reject (CA) and (MA) while rejecting also the thought that some appeal to power — be it a disposition, a potentiality, or a two-way power — is needed to account for abilities.
One recurrent thought is that, despite the various challenges that have been brought against it, ability is still intimately connected to some kind of relation between an agent’s volitions (tryings, intendings) and her actions. One semantically sophisticated development of this thought is Mandelkern et al, 2017, which proposes to take as basic a notion of ‘practically available actions,’ and to develop in terms of these a semantics for agentive modality, one on which conditionals linking volitions to actions continue to play an essential role. Another approach, in a recent book-length treatment of ability (Jaster 2020), proposes that abilities should be thought of in terms of proportions of cases where an agent successfully does what she intends to do (compare the approach to dispositions advocated in Manley and Wasserman 2008). Both of these approaches are explicit in their denial of (CA), but they share — with the new dispositionalists — the thought that the analysis of ability should somehow appeal to a pattern of dependence between volition and action.
This is not surprising. The conditional analysis is a redoubtable proposal, endorsed by many of the major figures in English-language philosophy. In light of that, it seems reasonable to try to discard the letter of (CA), but retain its spirit. For it may be that the historical failure of (CA) is due to difficulties and oversights that our perhaps firmer grasp of technical issues allows us to overcome. This is a sensible and well-motivated project, though it remains to be seen whether it will be, in the end, a successful one.
There remain still other accounts that do not fit easily into the taxonomy provided here. These include primitivist proposals, which take ability or some closely related notion as analytically fundamental. One development of this idea is Maier 2015, who proposes, contrary to most authors, that specific ability is fundamentally prior to general ability. He argues that we should give an account of general ability in terms of specific abilities, which he calls ‘options’: roughly, an agent has the general ability to A iff she normally has A as an option. Options, in turn, are primitives. Much here will hang on saying more about options, and in what sense they figure as primitives in the theory of agency.
Finally, an outline of a proposal by David Lewis (dated to 2001 but only recently published as Lewis 2020) offers an altogether different approach to ability. Lewis is motivated, like many proponents of (CA), by the goal of defending compatibilism, but he takes (CA) to be unsatisfactory. He therefore proposes a non-conditional analysis of ability. His analysis, roughly, is that S has the ability to perform an action B just in case there is some basic action A such that (i) S’s doing A would cause or constitute S’s doing B and (ii) there is no obstacle to S’s doing A. The problem of giving a theory of ability then becomes the problem of giving a theory of obstacles, something at which Lewis, in his outline, makes a beginning. (See Beebee et al 2020 for additional discussion).
Lewis’s proposal is an inspiration for further research in at least two ways. First, it indicates that Lewis, a systematic philosopher of modality, saw the problem of giving an analysis of ability as a significant outs