Abstract
When are events identical, when distinct? What criteria are there for deciding one way or the other in particular cases?
To my own profit I have discussed questions raised in this paper with P. F. Strawson, David Pears, John Wallace, and David Wiggins. David Kaplan commented on an earlier draft read at a colloquium at the University of California at Irvine in April, 1967, and some of the wisdom in his remarks, if not the wit, has been incorporated in the present draft. My research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
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References
This point is well stated by Jaegwon Kim, ‘On the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory’, American Philosophical Quarterly 3 (1966), 227–235.
For work along these lines, see my ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963), 685–700; The Logical Form of Action Sentences’, in The Logic of Decision and Action (ed. by N. Rescher), Pittsburgh, 1967; my comments on Richard Martin in Fact and Experience (ed. by J. Margolis), Oxford, 1969; `Causal Relations’, The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), 691–703.
The difficulty discussed here is raised by Anthony Kenny in Action, Emotion and Will, London, 1964, 2nd ed., chap. VII. In the second and third papers mentioned in the previous reference I devote more space to these matters and to the solution about to be outlined.
Georg Henrik von Wright, Norm and Action, London, 1963, p. 23.
‘Facts and Propositions’, reprinted in The Foundations of Mathematics, New York, 1950, pp. 140, 141.
See ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’, op. cit., pp. 91, 92 and `Causal Relations’, op. cit., pp. 649, 695.
F. I. Dretske in ‘Can Events Move?’ Mind 76 (1967), 479–492, correctly says that sentences do not refer to or describe events, and proposes that the expressions that do refer to events are the ones that can properly fill the blank in ‘When did occur (happen, take place)?’ This criterion includes (as it should) such phrases as ‘the immersion of the paper’ and ‘the death of Socrates’ but also includes (as it should not) `a discoloration of the fluid’.
In ‘On the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory’, op. cit. Essentially the same suggestion is made by Richard Martin in ‘On Events and Event-Description’ in Fact and Experience, op. cit.
Op. cit., p. 232 (footnote).
Individuals, London, 1959, pp. 46ff. I am not sure, however, that Strawson distinguishes clearly between: pointing out an entity to someone; producing a unique description of an entity; producing a description that is guaranteed to be unique.
Ibid., p. 53.
Ibid., pp. 51ff.
Ibid., p. 200.
The same conclusion is reached by J. Moravcsik, ‘Strawson and Ontological Priority’ in Analytical Philosophy, Second Series (ed. by R. J. Butler ), Oxford, 1965.
E. C. Bullard, The Detection of Underground Explosions’, Scientific American 215 (1966), 24.
Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet, New York, 1959, p. 35, says in effect that the poisoned Hamlet, in killing the King, avenges, among other murders, his own. This he could not do if he had not already been murdered.
I discuss this issue at greater length in a paper titled ‘Agency’ to be included in the proceedings of the November, 1968 colloquium on Agent, Action, and Reason at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
E. J. Lemmon, ‘Comments on D. Davidson’s “The Logical Form of Action Sentences”’, in The Logic of Decision and Action, op. cit. Lemmon goes further, suggesting that ‘... we may invoke a version of the identity of indiscernables and identify events with space-time zones’. But even if there can be only one event that fully occupies a space-time zone, it would be wrong to say a space-time zone is a change or a cause (unless we want to alter the language).
Thomas Nagel suggests the same criterion of the identity of events in ‘Physicalism’, The Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 346.
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Davidson, D. (1969). The Individuation of Events. In: Rescher, N. (eds) Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel. Synthese Library, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1466-2_11
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