Possessibility

Possessibility is a term used in philosophy, linguistics, and everyday discourse to describe the potential for possession—that is, the capacity or possibility that an agent has or may acquire ownership, control, or custody of an object, property, or status. In ordinary language, possessibility concerns whether it is feasible for someone to hold or exercise possession under given conditions, such as legal admissibility, skill, or opportunity.

In philosophy, possessibility is also treated as a modal concept related to what is possible for an agent to possess. For example, one can say that it is possible for a person to possess fluency in a language or to possess a certain amount of money, given future circumstances. In modal logic and possible-worlds semantics, expressions of possessibility are sometimes formalized with operators that scope over possessive relations: it may be that an agent possesses an object in some possible world, or that the agent could come to possess the object through actions.

In jurisprudence and political philosophy, possessibility bears on questions of property rights, acquisition, and transfer: the laws that govern who may possess what, and under what conditions possession constitutes ownership. Because the term is less common than possession itself, its precise meaning is often clarified by context, whether the discussion concerns social practice, linguistic semantics, or formal logic.