Abstract

The paper discusses Barbara Vetter’s strategy of grounding metaphysical modalities in the capacities or potentialities of individual things. The first concern is the direction of explanation in tautological and contradictory potentialities. It is argued that the possible and necessary truth of tautologies grounds the possession of tautological potentialities, not vice versa; and that the impossibility of contradictions explains why nothing has contradictory potentialities, not vice versa. It is also argued that Vetter cannot adhere to providing constraints on the existence of uninstantiated properties. Keywords: metaphysical modality, dispositional account of modality, grounding, tautological potentiality, uninstantiated properties.