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Doing Without Events
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Events have played a central role in a number of recent philosophical analyses. In general, there are two different sorts of arguments that might be offered in favour of an event analysis: first, it might be held that the constructions being analyzed contain certain nominals (expressions like “the sinking of the Lusitania,” or “Nixon's resignation“) which intuitively refer to events, and further that any satisfactory analysis must respect these intuitions; second, it might be argued that quite aside from our intuitions, the concept of an event — perhaps as a purely technical device — permits the solution of philosophical problems implicit in alternative non-event analyses (which typically take nominals as non-referring sentence transformations).
I wish to argue that both the above sorts of arguments fail. First, I argue that our intuitions about the reference on nominals are inconsistent, varying from context to context, so that the various sorts of event analyses cannot be talking about a single category of entities.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1978
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This paper has benefited from helpful comments by David Lewis and Richard Grandy.
References
1 See, for example, Davidson's, “Causal Relations,” The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), pp. 691–703;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Davidson's “The Individuation of Events” and Kim's “Events and Their Descriptions: Some Considerations,” both in Rescher, Nicholas et al., eds., Essays in Honour of Carl Hempel, G. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Goldman's, Alvin discussion in Chapter 1 of A Theory of Human Action, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970);Google Scholar and Montague, Richard “On the Nature of Certain Philosophical Entities,” The Monist 53 (1969), pp. 159-93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 See, for example, McCawley, James D. ‘Where Do Noun Phrases Come From?“ and Chomsky, Noam “Remarks on Nominalization,” both in Readings in English Transformational Grammar, ed. jacobs, R. and Rosenbaum, P. (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell-Ginn, 1967).Google Scholar
3 Austin, John “Unfair to Facts,” Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), p. 104Google Scholar.
4 Vendler, Zeno has proposed a referential analysis of nominals which has the reference depend on the context. See Linguistics in Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell, 1967CrossRefGoogle Scholar) and “Causal Relations,” The journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), pp. 704–10. I think Vendler's analysis is wrong because on reflection it will be seen that most contexts are what he calls “tolerant containers“ which are supposed to take only fact or proposition denoting nominals. This seems counter-intuitive. Shorter, J. M. in “Causality and a Method of Analysis,“ in Analytical Philosophy, second series, ed. Butler, R. J. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965)Google Scholar, criticizes a number of other aspects of Vendler's analysis. Shorter concludes that nominals in causal contexts often have no clear reference.
5 The transitive verb sentence is not equivalent to the causal sentence. See Davidson's, “The Logical Form of Action Sentences,” in Rescher, N. ed., The Logic of Decision and Action (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), pp. 85–86Google Scholar.
6 See Grice, Paul “The Causal Theory of Perception,” reprinted in Perceiving, Seeing, and Knowing, ed. Schwartz, Robert J. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965)Google Scholar.
7 “The Logical Form of Action Sentences,” p. 84.
8 Davidson, Donald “Events as Particulars,” Nous 4 (1970), p. 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See “Causal Relations.“
10 In A Theory of Human Action, Chapter 1, Goldman gives additional examples of this sort. Davidson might claim that these examples illustrate the use of “caused” in the special sense of “causally explains” — a sense he acknowledges at the end of “Causal Relations.” This acknowledgement is surprising because much of the earlier discussion was meant to show the impossibility of the closely related “sentential connective” interpretation. In fact the best evidence for the “causally explains” interpretation is just the sort of example given here, and these examples equally support the “K-event'' analysis discussed below. I can see no evidence to support claims of ambiguity nor has Davidson provided any criteria for identifying the sense used in a particular context.
11 Kim, Jaegwon “Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of an Event,“ The journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), p. 222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 For example, see Kim's “Events and Their Descriptions: Some Considerations“ and Davidson's “The Individuation of Events.“
13 Montague's theory of events would provide an interpretation under which (7) is true. This interpretation uses Montague's concept of an “individual event.” If D-events are taken to be “individual events” in Montague's sense, the contradiction I am arguing for cannot arise. However, since I can see no reading under which (7) comes out true, I claim that intuition does lead to the contradiction. Taking D-events to be individual events represents a move from a concrete particular supposedly required by intuition to a “philosophical entity” whose existence must be justified by the analytical work it performs.
14 Chisholm, Roderick “Events and Propositions,” Nous 4 (1970), pp. 15–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Davidson, “Events as Particulars,” p. 28Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., p. 26, and Davidson's, paper “Eternal vs. Ephemeral Events,” Nous 5 (1971), p. 347CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where Davidson writes”… the logical relations between sentences provide the only real test of when our language commits us to the existence of entities.“
17 E. J. Lemmon, “Comments on D. Davidson's “The Logical Form of Action Sentences,” in N. Rescher, The Logic of Decision and Action. Davidson's response is developed in “The Individuation of Events,” pp. 230–31.
18 “The Logical Form of Action Sentences,” p. 82.
19 Further counterexamples follow if we broaden the criteria for event identity along the lines suggested by Davidson's theory of action. According to that analysis, if I shoot and kill a werewolf, my pointing the gun and pulling the trigger is the same event as my shooting the werewolf. The D-event analysis of adverbial modification then implies that my pointing the gun and pulling the trigger was with a silver bullet, since my killing the werewolf was with a silver bullet.
20 See for example Clarke, Romane “Concerning the Logic of Predicate Modifiers,“ Nous 4 (1970), pp. 311-35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Parsons, Terence “Some Problems Concerning the Logic of Grammatical Modifiers,” Synthese 21 (1970), pp. 320-34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Wheeler, Samuel “Attributives and their Modifiers,” Nous 6 (1972), pp. 310-34Google Scholar. If we restrict ourselves to first order logic, or something of similar power, perhaps the simplest alternative to the Davidsonian analysis is the analysis presented by Richard Grandy in his paper “A Note on Grammar, Truth, and Logic,” presented at the 1974 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. In this analysis predicates are construed as having a variable number of argument places. Grandy outlines a semantics for a combinatorial logic containing such predicates and similar in power to first order quantification theory; with suitable axiomatization the desired inferences are forthcoming. Grandy's solution thus solves the problem of “variable polyadicity” without resort to quantification over events.
21 See “Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of an Event,” pp. 218–22.
22 Ibid., p. 232.
23 A discussion of non-event analyses of causation may be found in the first half of my paper “Causation and Necessity,” Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), pp. 444–64. The referee raises a point not discussed in that paper: how, without an ontology of events, are we to analyse claims such as ‘every event has a cause'? On a K-event analysis this claim would be tantamount to the claim that for every existent event, there is an existent event such that the two events satisfy Kim's analysis; i.e., (using the translation given above) for any sentencs Uz,t (of the appropriate kind) there is another true sentence U*z',t’ (also of the appropriate kind) such that these sentences instantiate regularities of such and such a kind, the location of z at t is contiguous with the location of z’ at t', etc. The D-event analysis, which gives a more direct rendering of the claim, is simply wrong according to my arguments. I do not think that Kim has his analysis of causation correctly worked out, but the existence of translations of the sort mentioned suggests that there is no reason to suppose that a fully worked out non-event theory of causation would fail to analyse such claims. Thus the case of non-event theories is not parallel to that of “no-truth” theories (of truth) which flounder on statements such as ‘everything he believes is true,'
24 For example, if one accepts possible worlds semantics in analyzing English, one may define functions with some of the properties of D-events or K-events. Montague used such entities in analyzing sentences like ‘the rising of a unicorn is not seen.’ On Montague's analysis this sentence turns out to have six distinct readings, a result I take to be counter-intuitive.