Statements ascribing dispositions or powers are somehow linked to conditional statements. Attempts have been made to provide reductive analyses of powers in terms of such stronger-than-material conditionals, that is, to claim that the ascription to an object of a power or disposition is logically equivalent to one or more suitably glossed and qualified conditional statements about events involving the object. This chapter argues that the claimed equivalence does not hold if the conditional statement is formulated in a certain way, as demonstrated by two intuitive cases; and second, that this conclusion can be evaded by reformulating the conditional, but only at the cost of making the reformulation trivial.
Keywords: equivalence, conditional statement, realism, dispositions