Exploring Potency

The original notion of potency -- one of the core features underpinning many forms of multi-level modeling -- has come under pressure in several ways: First, since its inception new modeling challenges have come to the fore that raise serious questions about classic potency. Second, classic potency was developed in the context of constructive modeling and does not accommodate exploratory modeling, thus representing a major hindrance to the unification of constructive and exploratory modeling in a multi-level modeling context. Third, as the discipline of multi-level modeling has evolved, a number of alternative interpretations of potency have emerged. In part, these are based on different underlying principles, yet an explicit recognition of the respective differences at a foundational level and an explicit discussion of the tradeoffs involved has been missing from the literature to date. In this paper, I identify limitations of classic potency, propose to evolve it to a potency notion based on a new foundation which -- along with further novel proposals -- addresses the aforementioned challenges, and finally conduct a comparison to three alternative definitions of potency.