The Sleeping Chess Player: Gewirth vs. Searle on Leibniz's Distinction Between Powers and Dispositions

Chess is everywhere, and it ought to be! See here. Excerpt:



Like Locke and other empiricists, Leibniz distinguishes between powers and acts, i.e., between the capacity for having or perceiving ideas and the actual occurrence or perception of ideas. But unlike the empiricists, Leibniz also distinguishes between powers and dispositions or potentialities (Leibniz's French word here is virtualités). The difference between these is that powers are passive, indeterminate, and remote, while dispositions, in Leibniz's view of them, are active, determinate, and proximate. Powers as such require the stimulation of external objects both in order to be activated and in order to receive their perceptual or ideational contents; hence, they have no specific contents of their own. Dispositions, on the other hand, already have determinate contents which the mind can itself activate, given appropriate external occasions. Both powers and dispositions may be called "capacities," but then they are capacities of two quite different sorts. The difference may be illustrated by the way in which both the normal human infant and the sleeping, avid chessplayer [emphasis added] may be said to have the "capacity" to play chess. In these terms, then, Leibniz and Chomsky affirm, and the empiricists and behaviorists deny, that the human mind has dispositions and not mere powers, and that basic ideas and linguistic rules are had in the latter way and not in the former.