What if your potentialism is implicitly actualist? Oxford conference, March 2024

This will be a talk at the conference Challenging the Infinite, March 11-12 at Oxford University. (Please register now to book a place.)

Abstract Many commonly considered forms of potentialism, I argue, are implicitly actualist in the sense that a corresponding actualist ontology and theory is interpretable within the potentialist framework using only the resources of the potentialist ontology and theory. And vice versa. For these forms of potentialism, therefore, there seems to be little at stake in the debate between potentialism and actualism—the two perspectives are bi-interpretable accounts of the same underlying semantic content. Meanwhile, more radical forms of potentialism, lacking convergence and amalgamation, do not admit such a bi-interpretation with actualism. In light of this, the central dichotomy in potentialism, to my way of thinking, is not concerned with any issue of height or width, but rather with convergent versus divergent possibility.

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