Nancy Cartwright Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

" Tendencies may be regarded as powers or liabilities of a thing which may be exercised without being manifest in any particular outcome. " 1 So claims Roy Bhaskar, who wishes to uphold the possibility of tendencies being exercised yet unfulfilled. Intuitively, this position is quite defensible, though, in this short note, I shall propose an example that would confirm Bhaskar's intuition with regard to powers but not liabilities. I will argue on the basis of a broadly Aristotelian analysis in which action and passion are grounded in the very same reality, namely, a reality that is in the patient but from the agent. Let's take an oven as our agent and some cake mixture as our patient so that our action and passion are cooking and being cooked. We may speak of the tendencies of the agent and the patient as powers and liabilities respectively. First we switch the oven on, and a little later, we put the cake mixture in the oven. We have three states of the agent (cold, hot, and cooking) but just two to the patient (uncooked and cooked) and two changes to the agent but just one to the patient. Regarding the agent, the first change is from the first state to the second and the second change is from the second state to the third, though, of course, a real distinction obtains between the first and the second, but not the second and the third. In this case (of the agent) we can easily see how tendencies can be spoken of as exercised yet unfulfilled. In the first change of the agent, being switched on, the tendency of the oven to cook is fairly described as a tendency that is exercised, or " in play " yet not fulfilled, that is, as contrasted with its second change, in which the tendency to cook becomes fulfilled. However, whilst these two changes are truly predicated of the oven, only the first change is predicated intrinsically of the oven. For when the cake is placed in the oven the oven " changes " from being merely a hot oven to being a cooking oven, not in virtue of any quality that accrues to the oven, but in virtue of changes intrinsic to something else, namely, the cake. In this example, the tendency in question is a power, or better, an active power, rather than a liability. And precisely because such tendencies are active they may also be described as having efficient causality. That's why we can make " extrinsic predications " and hence speak of tendencies as exercised yet unfulfilled—the exercise being predicated intrinsically and the fulfilment being predicated extrinsically. In the case of the patient, patently the cake mixture has a tendency or liability or " passive potency " that musical notes, say, lack and, indeed, we do have a change: the cake mixture becomes cooked. However, such change is intrinsic to the cake, and with regard to the patient we do not predicate extrinsically. So, with respect to the cake mixture, if its tendency to be cooked is exercised at all, that tendency will be fulfilled. It's difficult to see how a tendency which is a liability may be exercised yet unfulfilled. We are not able to re-describe the passive tendency in terms of efficient causality. Bhaskar seems to be thinking of component forces, as say, when we are pushed and pulled in opposite directions but remain unmoved. For instance, and to persist with the cake making analogy, we might consider those recipes that instruct us to cook for one hour, and then, for the final half-hour, place some grease-proof paper over the cake to prevent it burning. Can we 1 Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds: Verso, 1997) 14.