Ability and Actuality

ABSTRACT This paper gives a new account of the actuality entailments of ability claims. We observe that, in the environments which give rise to the actuality entailment, ability claims carry a presupposition of trying. We show that, given this presupposition, the actuality entailment is straightforwardly predicted by a conditional theory of ability. We give a theory of why this presupposition arises, showing how to derive it from a presupposition of strong settledness. We then show how to predict contextual variation in the precise content of our presupposition; how to extend our account to apparent deontic and teleological actuality entailments; and how to adapt our account to more sophisticated conditional accounts of ability.