Essence and Potentiality Barbara Vetter University of Oxford (This is a draft – please do not quote!) Abstract Kit Fine has argued that we should understand necessity in terms of essence, rather than vice versa. I argue for a similar but distinct alternative: we should understand possibility in terms of potentiality (dispositions, abilities, etc.), rather than vice versa. My proposed account, like the essentialist one, grounds modality in the things of the actual world. But it is preferable to Fine’s account for two reasons. First, we have a better and more intuitive understanding of potentialities than of essences: they are properties of ordinary concrete things that we deal with in everyday life. Second, there is a more convincing case for the claim that potentiality does not reduce to possibility which, unlike Fine’s argument against the reduction of essence to necessity, does not need to appeal to strange properties. I conclude by sketching what a potentiality-based account of modality would look like. 1 Fine on Essence and Necessity Kit Fine has famously argued that the notion of a thing’s essence cannot be reduced to, or derived from, that of metaphysical necessity (cf. especially Fine 1994, but also Fine 1995a and Fine 1995b). Using Fine’s notation  x p for ’it is true in virtue of the essence of x that p’, the modal account of essence says that the equivalence  x Φx ≡ Φx not only holds, but also characterizes what it is for any object x to be essentially Φ. (The equivalence may be complicated considerably, most obviously by conditionalizing the right- hand side on x’s existence; but for present purposes it is sufficient to stick to the simplest version.) Fine argues that the modal account fails because the equivalence does not hold: it has false instances when read from right to left. Thus it is true that Socrates is necessarily a member of {Socrates}, and that Socrates is necessarily such that 2 + 2 = 4; but neither of 1