Temporalización

So let me conclude by noting that Davidson does have views, most famously expressed in his Davidson 1980c [1970], on these large questions. He holds that all causes – or better, all basic causes – satisfy predicates that figure in systems of “strict” laws (i.e., laws without “ceteris paribus” clauses that cover factors not captured by the relevant system of laws). Davidson also claims, plausibly enough, that only predicates from the physical sciences figure in strict laws; and so he concludes that all causes are physical causes. Spelling out this view, and assessing its plausibility, is a topic for another chapter.16_{For these purposes, the important point is that Davidson’s claims} about events are embedded in an overall conception of causal relations that includes claims about facts, explanations, laws of nature, and mind- body relations; consider, in this regard, the remarkably broad yet integrated range of ideas found in Davidson 1980a [1967]; 1980b [1967]; 1980 [1969]; 1980c [1970]; 1980a [1971]; 1984 [1967]; 1984 [1968]. The methodological suggestion is that claims about “what events are” need to be evaluated in light of (i) our best theories of meaning for the languages we speak, and (ii) our best conceptions of the characteristics – intrinsic and relational – that events appear to exhibit. For ordinary claims have implications about events; and claims about events are in turn crucially related to how we think about causation, space-time, ourselves, and how we are related to the physical world that we often talk about and occasionally comprehend. Davidson thus shows how apparently narrow and technical questions about the semantics of natural language sentences can bear on the more traditional questions of philosophy.

Notes

1. Davidson (1980 [1963]) argued that the actions of persons, such as Nora’s action of snapping her fingers, are events with mental (and rationalizing) causes (see Chapter 2). Yet even granting that actions are things that happen, it remains an open question whether Nora’s action was the relevant motion of her fingers, or a mental episode of “willing” her fingers to move, or something else (perhaps a complexevent with subparts).

2. For present purposes, I ignore tense and relativization of the truth predicate to a language. This will not affect the substance of the following discussion. 3. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Davidson’s program of truth-theoretic seman-

tics and the importance of representing the compositional structure of natural language sentences. For these purposes, I won’t worry about the distinction be- tween representing the truth conditions of natural language sentences with sen- tences of a formal language (whose predicates are not vague) and regimenting the natural language sentence. See Pietroski forthcoming-a for a discussion of the possibility that a semantic theory will not associate (contextualized utterances

Semantics and Metaphysics ofEvents 161

of ) unregimented declarative sentences with compositionally determined truth conditions.

4. I will come back to sentences such as (6) and (7). Davidson (1980b [1967]) would represent their truth conditions as in (6a) and (7a).

(6a) (∃e)(Fell2(Caesar, e))

(7a) (∃e)(Gave4(Caesar, Brutus, a coin, e))

Davidson 1985a adopts a modified proposal to be discussed in§4.

5. Think of instantiating ‘ ’ with ‘stabbing of Caesar by Brutus’ – i.e., ‘Stacae- brutish’. And note that any instance of conjunction reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier is formally valid. This is not to say that all adverbs can be viewed as predicates of events. Davidson (1980b [1967]) suggests that we gloss ‘Brutus intentionally stabbed Caesar’ along the lines of ‘It was intentional of Brutus that he stabbed Caesar’ (or ‘Brutus intended to stab Caesar and did so’), with ‘intend’ taking scope over an entire embedded clause; cf. ‘It was believed by Brutus that he stabbed Caesar’. Parsons (1990) provides an event accounts of ‘She opened the door halfway’, which does not mean than an event of opening was halfway; see also Parsons’s account of progressive constructions such as ‘He was crossing the street when he was struck by a bus’.

6. Cf. Montague 1974. One could say that (19) is true iff Poked-With3(Shem,

Shaun, a red stick); see Kenny 1963. But as Davidson (1980b [1967]) noted, pursuing this strategy requires an open-ended number of complexpredicates that take differing numbers of arguments: ‘Shem poked Shaun with a red stick at noon’ is true iff Poked-With-At4(Shem, Shaun, a red stick, noon), etc. And

without meaning postulates that effectively encode the relevant implications, the truth of ‘Poked-With-At4(Shem, Shaun, a red stick, noon)’ does not ensure

the truth of ‘Poked-With3(Shem, Shaun, a red stick)’ or ‘Poked2(Shem, Shaun)’.

See Taylor (1985), who provides another argument for an event semantics, based on the ambiguity of ‘Henry gracefully ate all the crisps’ – which could mean either that each eating of a crisp by Henry was graceful, or that the complex event of eating all the crisps was graceful. See also the following discussion of plurality.

7. In order to see that it should be ‘a death of Caesar’ rather than ‘Caesar’s death’, we only have to notice that (28) could be true even if reincarnation were possible. 8. Though it is sometimes hard to say which thematic roles a given verb has; see Larson and Segal 1995 for an introduction to this issue. One could represent the truth condition for ‘there was a stabbing’ with (∃x)(∃y)(∃e)(Stabbed3(x, y, e)).

But as Parsons (1990) notes, this is to assume (tendentiously) that if there was a stabbing, it follows that someone stabbed someone.

9. Note that ‘for four philosophers x, (∃e)(Taught(three linguists, x, five theories,

e))’ fails to require that the same three linguists did all of the teaching. One can

impose this requirement as follows: for some plurality x of three linguists, there are four individual philosophers y, such that (∃e)(Taught(x, y, five theories, e)). But then it follows that the whole plurality of linguists taught each student five theories; whereas the intended reading leaves open the possibility that each philosopher was taught five theories by a single linguist.

162 PAUL PIETROSKI