Abstract
Events are widely supposed to be the natural, worldly entities related by causation. In many a philosopher’s view, that is precisely what they are good for, ontologically speaking.72 Most philosphers go along with common sense in holding that events are spatiotemporally situated items that happen, or occur.73 But beyond that minimal assumption there is hardly any consensus to be found in the literature on this subject. I would like to start my discussion of events, in the present chapter, by rejecting two event conceptions. The first one is that of events as having a spatiotemporal mereology, a bit like objects. The second, to which I will dedicate the most effort, is Davidson’s conception of events as concrete entities. In the next chapter I will outline what seems to me the correct view.
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References
E.g. Lewis (1986c, 241): ‘Events are not much of a topic in their own right.’
the only exception that I know of being Chisholm (1970) who claims that events can occur more than once.
Davidson (1967b) also has an argument, put forward earlier by Frege and Quine, that is intended to show that if events are referred to by true sentences there can only be one event, because all true sentences have the same denotation: the True. This ‘Slingshot argument,’ as it is called (see Searle 1995, 113), is not, in fact, an argument against a factualist causal ontology, but against a correspondence theory of truth. But it is clear that if correspondence theory is false, the prospects for fact-like causal relata will not be good. I will not try to dismantle that argument here, but see Menzies (1989, 78–82), Searle 1995, 221–6 and Mellor 1995, 113–9.
I say ‘may be,’ not ‘is’: I am not at all sure whether someone who knows that the man with the biggest nose in France is President De Gaulle would consider this sentence false. Also, someone who does not not know that President De Gaulle is such an influential person (but does perhaps know that the man with the biggest nose is influential) needs not at all accept ‘There was a crisis because President De Gaulle held a speech.’ Intensionality seems less important than background knowledge on the part of the inquirer.
Hence the intelligibility of the characterization UFO. Surely, making sense of unidentified events, let alone of unidentified states of affairs, is much harder. Note that I am not claiming here that there can be featureless particulars. I am also not claiming that particulars can be picked out without characterizing them at all; just that they can be picked out by their mere spatial boundaries.
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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De Muijnck, W. (2003). Getting Events Wrong. In: Dependencies, Connections, and Other Relations. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0121-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0121-1_10
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