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Whither States?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

J. Montmaruet
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Extract

In a number of influential papers, Donald Davidson has argued the desirability of admitting events into our ontology. In this paper I will try to show that all of Davidson's arguments for events serve equally well to provide proper ontological credentials for states. As conceived here, states are like Davidsonian events in being unrepealable particulars; they differ only in not being changes. A state will always consist in an object's (or set of objects’) remaining the same in respect of some one or more properties during a time interval. Thus, a leaf's turning red would be an event; its remaining so, a state. In a brief final section, I will suggest some of the implications of my argument for semantics and general ontology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , June 1980 , pp. 251 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 For Davidson's theory of adverbial modification, see (e.g.), “The logical Form of Action Sentences” in Rescher, N. ed., The Logic of Decision and Action (Pittsburgh, 1967), pp. 81–95.Google Scholar

2 Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 3 (1923), pp. 95-113.

3 See “Causal Relations” in The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), pp. 691-703.

4 “The Individuation of Events” in Rescher, N. et al., eds., Essays in Honor of Carl Hempel (Dordrecht, 1970), p. 218.Google Scholar Subsequent page references in the text are to this volume.

5 For examples see Parsons, Terence “Some Problems Concerning the Logic of Grammatical Modifiers” in Harman and Davidson, eds., The Semantics of Natural Languages (Dordrecht, 1972), pp. 127–141;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hargan, Terence “The Case Against Events”, Philosophical Review 87 (1978), pp. 28–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Parsons’ theory, for example, requires an ontology of event·like states of affairs; Hargan's, of sets.