 giving such a theory will be difficult enough even when we focus on paradigm cases of agency and action, and so on paradigm cases of ability.
Note there is a similarity between the present category of ability, as distinct from other powers, and the traditional category of active powers, where active powers are those that essentially involve the will (Reid 1788/2000). But it is not clear that these distinctions overlap exactly. For example, the power to will itself will clearly be an active power. It is less clear whether it will count as an ability, for the answer to that question will turn on the contentious question of whether willing is itself an action.
Some will expect that an account of ability would also be an account of what it is to know how to perform an action, on the supposition that one knows how to perform a certain action just in case one has the ability to perform that action. This supposition, which we may call the Rylean account of know how (since it is most explicitly defended in Ryle 1949, 25–61), has been called into question by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (Stanley and Williamson 2001). Let us briefly consider Stanley and Williamson’s argument and how it bears on the theory of ability.
Stanley and Williamson argue, on broadly linguistic grounds, that our default view of know how ought to be rather different from Ryle’s. Part of the argument for this is that standard treatments of embedded questions (‘know who’, ‘know where’, and so forth; see Karttunen 1977) suggest a rather different treatment. On this treatment, to know how to A is to know a certain proposition. At first pass, in Stanley and Williamson’s presentation, for S to know how to A is for S to know, of some contextually relevant way of acting w, that w is a way for S to A. Stanley and Williamson develop and defend such a treatment, and offer independent considerations for rejecting Ryle’s own arguments for the Rylean view. On their view, then, to know how to A is not to have an ability.
Stanley and Williamson’s arguments are far from widely accepted (see Noë 2005), but they tell at the very least against simply assuming that an account of ability will also be an account of know how. So we will leave questions of know how to one side in what follows. It is also reasonable to hope that an account of ability, while it may not simply be an account of know how, will at least shed light on disputes about know how. For so long as we lack a theory of what an ability is, the precise content of the Rylean view (and of its denial) remains unclear. So it may be that getting clear on abilities may help us, perhaps indirectly, to get clear on know how as well. (Additional discussion of these questions may be found in Stanley’s book-length development of his and Williamson’s initial position (Stanley 2011), as well as the papers collected in (Bengson and Moffett 2011).
Whatever our view of ability and know how, there is a further question at the intersection of these topics that bears consideration. This is how to accommodate those powers of agents that appear to be especially closely connected to practical intelligence, such as skills and talents — which we might collectively call the intelligent powers. Are the intelligent powers simply a species of ability, or do they demand an independent treatment? There are a number of recent proposals to be considered here. (Robb forthcoming) proposes a dispositionalist theory of talent, on which a talent is a disposition to maintain and develop a skill. (McGeer 2018) emphasizes the significance of a distinctive kind of intelligent power, which she (following Ryle) calls an ‘intelligent capacity,’ and of which she too offers a broadly dispositionalist account. These proposals suggest a more general program of dispositionalism about the intelligent powers, which has suggestive parallels to the dispositionalism about ability that we will consider in Section 5.1. Still more generally, accurately accounting for the nature of the intelligent powers, and the relationship of these to abilities and to the powers