ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to provide some epistemological problems that have given rise to unacceptable theories about the nature of potentiality, theories that all tend to terminate in metaphysical determinism. It suggests that these problems necessarily cannot be instantly dispelled by the 'analysis' of possibility-statements into something equivalent but unproblematical: the feature of possibility-statements that underlies them is irreducible. The difference between 'epistemic' or relative possibility and 'ontological' or natural possibility corresponds to the difference between certainty and necessity. Hume's earlier mentions of power in the Treatise are subordinate to his concern with necessity and causality. There are, traditionally, three plausible but wrong epistemological attitudes such as: transcendentalism (or realism), scepticism and reductionism towards power, all represented in the argument of Hume's Treatise. It is perhaps in elucidating such distinctions, rather than in making any great contribution towards the solution of more general epistemological difficulties about 'unobservable' properties, that the present analysis of natural power has its chief utility.
