Actual Abilities

Abstract Abilities, one might think, are essentially modal: they are about powers, potentials, and possibilities, but not directly about what is in fact happening. However, our ability talk sometimes comes with a surprising kind of inference which casts doubt on this. When one says ‘I was finally able to lift the chair’ the hearer will infer that the speaker lifted the chair, not merely that they had the power to do so. In this paper I develop a detailed semantic account which explains those so-called actuality entailments for ability modals. I will not assume a particular semantics for ability modals, although I will show in detail how one could explain the phenomenon based on the influential conditional analysis of abilities. I will argue that actuality entailments arise because of the essential temporal structure of abilities, and briefly discuss what this might mean for the debate about the fixity of the past and the open future.