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Powers, Possibilities, and Time

Of equally fundamental importance to the current debate over causal powers are its Megaric consequences, the connection between powers and modality. One of the central motivations for adopting a powers ontology is said to be the support causal powers provide for grounding and explaining alternative possibilities. Calvin Normore provides a robust defence of this idea by defending the deeper thesis that time makes a difference for modalities because the existence of powers at a time impose formal constraints on the structural conditions governing the accessibility relation between the actual and the possible. Some alternative states of affairs are not genuine possibilities in the actual world, he argues, because of the powers that obtain in the actual world. Normore, moreover, roots his defence of this thesis in the medieval debate between Scotus and Ockham over whether what is possible is possibly actual (Scotus maintained ‘no it need not be’, whereas Ockham maintained ‘yes it had to be’).