In the material mode, the modal analysis gives an account of what it is to have an ability in terms of quantification over possible worlds. In the formal mode, it gives a semantics for the ascription of ability — paradigmatically, sentences involving ‘can’ or ‘is able to’ — in terms of quantification over possible worlds.
This formal aspect of the modal analysis has been prominent in the philosophical and linguistic literature because the standard semantics for ability ascriptions is an explicitly modal one. This is the view developed in a series of papers by Angelika Kratzer (Kratzer 2012). Kratzer treats expressions such as ‘S can A’ and ‘S is able to A’ as possibility claims. That is, ‘S is able to A’ is true just in case there is a possible world w meeting certain conditions at which S does A. The conditions are that (i) w be accessible given some contextually-specified set of facts (the modal base) and (ii) that w be at least as good, according to a contextually-specified ranking of worlds (the ordering source), as any other accessible world. The Kratzer semantics is thus an instance of the modal analysis on its semantic formulation:
(MAsemantic) ‘S is able to A’ is true iff S does A at some world (or set of worlds) satisfying condition C.
A number of objection have been brought against the modal analysis in this latter, formal, aspect.
One objection prominent in the recent literature (Mandelkern et al. 2017; Schwarz 2020) is that Kratzer’s semantics, or any analysis of the form of (MAsemantic), appears to have trouble marking an intuitive distinction between what someone is able to do and what it is possible for her to do. Let us say that an unskilled darts-player is about to throw a dart. She utters:
(3) I am able to hit the bullseye
Intuitively, what she says is false: she is not able to hit the bullseye, as she is a poor darts-player. Yet there is an accessible and perfectly good possible world w at which she hits the bullseye — which is just to say, in the object language, that it is possible for her to hit the bullseye.
This case suggests the Kratzer semantics lacks the resources to capture the distinctively agentive force of a sentences such as (3). There are, in addition, a number of other outstanding empirical problems for Kratzer’s semantics for ability modals. One is the problem of accounting for ‘compulsion’ modals such as ‘I cannot but tell the truth’ (Mandelkern et al. 2017). Another is that of accommodating the ‘actuality entailment’ whereby, in many languages, certain ability sentences entail that the act in question was actually performed (Bhatt 1999; see also Hacquard 2009). Whatever our verdict on (MAsemantic), the semantics of ability-ascriptions remains an unresolved and potentially rich issue at the boundary of linguistics and the philosophy of action.
The foregoing has indicated serious concerns about the adequacy of the orthodox approaches to ability and its ascription: the conditional analysis (CA), and the modal analysis (MA), of which (CA) is arguably just a special case. This raises the question of what a non-hypothetical and non-modal account of ability and its ascription might look like.
Since abilities are, as noted in Section 1.1, a kind of power, one natural idea is to analyze abilities in terms of some other kind of power. This appeal may proceed in different ways. One is by appealing to dispositions, and by analyzing abilities in terms of this purportedly better-understood kind of power. Another is by departing more radically from the standard ontology of recent metaphysics, and analyzing ability in terms of some new and distinctive variety of power. We will consider these approaches in turn in Sections 5.1 and 5.2. Finally, in Section 5.3, we will turn to miscellaneous alternative approaches to ability, which reject the conditional and modal analyses, but which do not purport to analyze abilities in terms of powers either.
In recent years several authors have revisited the thought that we may give a broadly hypothetical account of ability, without endorsing the problematic claim (