We began with a simple distinction.
Possibility concerns what a situation leaves open.
Potential concerns what a participant is ready or able to do within that situation.
It is tempting, however, to collapse the two.
After all, if something is possible, doesn't someone or something have the potential to make it happen?
Not necessarily.
A possibility can exist without being available to any particular participant.
And a participant can have a capacity without the situation providing any opportunity for its exercise.
This is easiest to see with something ordinary.
A door is open.
Passage is possible.
But whether a particular person can pass through depends upon other relations: their physical capacities, the width of the doorway, what they are carrying, where they are trying to go, whether something obstructs the path.
The possibility belongs to the arrangement.
The potential belongs to the participant's relation to the arrangement.
Change the arrangement, and the possibilities change.
Change the participant's circumstances, and their potential may change.
Neither is simply reducible to the other.
This matters because we often speak of potential as though it were a hidden substance inside things.
A seed has the potential to become a tree.
A child has the potential to become a musician.
A machine has the potential to perform a particular task.
A theory has the potential to explain something.
There is a natural picture behind such statements.
The potential is imagined as something already present, waiting to be released.
Becoming then appears as the unfolding of what was already there.
But our relational account gives us reason to be cautious.
The seed does not contain "tree" as a miniature future object.
Its potential depends upon its relations with soil, water, temperature, light, other organisms and time.
Change those relations and what the seed can become changes.
The potential was never simply inside the seed.
It belonged to the seed in a world.
This gives us a useful way of distinguishing potential from possibility.
Possibility is generated by the organisation of relations in a field.
Potential concerns the way a participant is positioned within that field.
The field may make something possible without making it possible for this participant.
And the participant may be capable of something that the field does not currently make possible.
A swimmer without water still has the capacity to swim.
But there is no swimming to be done.
The potential remains while the possibility is absent.
Conversely, a body of water may make swimming possible without every participant being capable of swimming.
The possibility remains while the relevant potential is absent.
So neither possibility nor potential is sufficient for becoming.
Something must bring them into relation.
This is perhaps why the distinction between them is more than linguistic.
It tells us something about how becoming occurs.
A possibility is not yet an achievement.
A potential is not yet an achievement either.
Both concern what has not happened.
But they do so from different positions.
Possibility looks outward towards the field:
What does this configuration leave open?
Potential looks from the participant into that field:
What can this participant take up?
The difference becomes particularly important when we think about change.
Suppose a new technology makes an action possible that was previously unavailable.
The possibility has changed.
But the potential of individual participants to make use of it may vary enormously.
Some may already possess the relevant skills.
Some may be able to acquire them.
Some may be excluded by other relations.
The emergence of a possibility therefore does not automatically produce its actualisation.
It changes the field within which potential can operate.
And the converse is equally important.
A participant may acquire a new capacity without the surrounding world changing in a way that allows that capacity to be exercised.
A new potential does not automatically create a new possibility.
It may instead alter the participant's relation to existing possibilities.
This gives us a more relational conception of potential.
Potential is not a stock of unrealised possibilities hidden inside an entity.
It is a readiness for particular forms of becoming, constituted through relations.
That last phrase matters.
For if potential is relational, then it can change without the participant itself undergoing an intrinsic transformation.
The locked door did not make the person less capable of walking.
The person remained the same.
What changed was the relation through which their capacity could be exercised.
Likewise, opening the door does not give the person a new capacity to walk.
It changes the conditions under which an existing capacity can participate.
Potential and possibility therefore form neither a hierarchy nor a simple causal sequence.
They are two perspectives on the conditions of becoming.
Possibility is what the field leaves open.
Potential is what a participant can take up within that openness.
And this also helps us see why neither concept should be confused with probability.
Something can be possible without being probable.
Something can be highly probable without being possible for a particular participant.
And something can be within a participant's potential without being likely to occur.
The distinctions are beginning to multiply.
Perhaps that is not a problem.
Perhaps it is what happens when concepts that looked interchangeable are allowed to retain their differences.
Possibility tells us about the openness of a world.
Potential tells us about the readiness of a participant.
Probability tells us about how an occurrence is assessed.
They answer different questions because they arise from different relations.
And now we can return to the question with which we began.
If possibility is what the world leaves open, and potential is what a participant is ready or able to take up, then becoming cannot be located entirely in either one.
It must occur in the relation between them.
A possibility becomes something different when a participant takes it up.
A participant becomes something different when it does.
And when that happens, the relations of the world may change as well.
Perhaps, then, potential is not what lies before becoming.
Perhaps it is what becomes visible when a participant encounters a possibility.
Which leaves us with the question for the next step:
What happens when potential meets possibility?
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