 The first reason, that of coverage, is the following. Many of the most prominent theories of ability defended in the philosophical literature have in fact been, in the first place, theories of ability-ascriptions. Indeed, the central thought in much work on ability in the analytic tradition has been a kind of semantic deflationism, on which we may give a semantics for ability-ascriptions that does not quantify over abilities themselves. This is arguably the main theme of the hypothetical theories to be considered in Section 3, and the modal theories to be considered in Section 4. Given this tendency in thinking about ability, an overview of philosophical work on ability that neglected the role of ability-ascriptions would be seriously incomplete.