A New Look at Shoemaker’s Theory of Properties

Sydney Shoemaker has advanced a theory of properties that serves as a locus classicus of the view that properties must be individuated by the causal powers that they confer on their instances. His theory is not only important in its own right but also it has deep and far-reaching implications for plenty of philosophical issues, for instance, dispositional essentialism, the dispositional/categorical distinction, the ontological status of laws of nature, to name a few. Curiously enough, however, its validity hasn’t been carefully examined so far. In the early part of this paper, I will defend Shoemaker’s view that properties are not powers but nonetheless clusters of conditional powers from one possible objection. In its later part, however, I will point out a crucial flaw of Shoemaker’s view, presenting a counterexample to the idea that properties are necessarily associated with certain sets of conditional powers. From this I will conclude that Shoemaker’s theory of properties is in trouble.