ABSTRACT
Possibility and possibilities are central to the human condition in specific ways that they are not for non-human entities. Thus possibility is very often understood in terms of the much-cited axis of "enablement/constraint". Human history is the history of the literally constant emergence of new, generalised possibilities for acting and for being. The impossibility in question is, for lack of a better term, historical and "ethnographic". The idea that human history is marked by the continuous emergence of new possibilities for action and being implies that humans are constantly acquiring new capacities that literally did not previously exist. Human capacities to do certain things – marked by the existence of certain practices – should be partially distinguished from other forms of causal capacity. Assumptions of uniform regularity lie at the heart of conventional understandings of causality in the social sciences and elsewhere.
