On a highly influential way to think of modality, that I call ‘relationalism’, the modality of a state is explained by its being composed of properties, and these properties being related by a higher-order and primitively modal relation. Examples of relationalism are the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong account of natural necessity, many dispositional essentialist views, and Wang’s incompatibility primitivism. I argue that relationalism faces four difficulties: that the selection between modal relations is arbitrary, that the modal relation cannot belong to any logical order, that to explain how the modal relation can relate properties of different adicities additional ideological complexity has to be introduced, and that not all modal constraints are relational. From the discussion, I will extract desiderata for a successor theory of modality.

在一种极具影响力的模态思考方式上，我称之为“关系主义”，状态的模态通过其由属性组成来解释，并且这些属性通过更高阶和原始模态关系相关联。关系主义的例子有 Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong 对自然必然性的解释、许多倾向性本质主义观点，以及 Wang 的不相容原始主义。我认为关系主义面临四个困难：模态关系之间的选择是任意的，模态关系不能属于任何逻辑顺序，为了解释模态关系如何关联不同性质的属性，必须引入额外的意识形态复杂性，以及并非所有模态约束都是相关的。从讨论中，我将提取模态后继理论的必要条件。