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Identity Conditions and Events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Edward Wierenga  and
Richard Feldman
Edward Wierenga
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
Richard Feldman
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Extract

According to Myles Brand, ‘[t]he key to advocating a particularist account of events -or any account of events - is to provide adequate identity conditions’ . He thinks that the function of an identity condition is ‘to specify the nature of’ events.

To state an identity condition for events is to provide a way to complete the formula:

(IC) (e) (f) (if e and fare events, then e=f iff----)

The mere fact that a proposed completion of (IC) is true does not imply that it is an informative identity condition for events or that it plays any role in specifying the nature of events.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 77 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 “Identity Conditions for Events”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1977); pp. 329-337; p. 329. The identity condition which Brand proposes in this paper was first presented in his contribution to the Winnipeg Conference on Human Action, “Particulars, Events, and Actions”, in Brand, M. and Walton, D. eds., Action Theory (Dordrecht; D. Reidel, 1976), pp. 133–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 “Identity Conditions for Events”, p. 330. In a similar vein, Alvin Goldman remarks that a ‘desideratum of such a criterion is that it lay bare the nature, or ontological status of [events].’ See “The Individuation of Action”, Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1965), pp. 761-774, esp. p. 768.

3 Ibid. See also “Particulars, Events, and Actions”, p. 136.

4 “Identity Conditions for Events”, p. 330.

5 Ibid., p. 334.

6 Similarly, on this view, a world in which Jones signals without raising his arm need not be a world in which (D), that is, the event which is (in the actual world) Jones's signaling, occurs but (C), that is, the event which is (in the actual world) Jones's raising his arm, does not occur. Rather, such a world could be one in which neither (C) nor (D) occurs but some other event, such as Jones's winking, does occur and is a signaling.

7 Ibid., p. 329.

8 Ibid., p. 330.

9 For example, Donald Davidson's remark that ‘it is one thing for a criterion to be correct, another for it to be useful,’ suggests that he would require that an identity condition for events satisfy some requirement other than (1 ). See “The Individuation of Events”, in Rescher, N. ed., Essays in Honor of Carl Hempel, G. (Dordrecht; D. Reidel, 1969); pp. 216–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The quoted sentence appears on p. 231.

10 “Identity Conditions for Events”, p. 330.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Difficulties for this proposal and for (v), below, arise if there are kinds with only one instance or ‘disjunctive’ kinds such as the kind: events or The Eiffel Tower.

15 “Identity Conditions for Events”, p. 333.

16 Ibid., p. 331. In “Particulars, Events, and Actions”, Brand proposes what seems to be a similar requirement, pp. 136-7.

17 It might be objected that (3) has the false consequence that there can be only one event that occurs necessarily. It is not obvious that this consequence is false, but if it is, it is because there are diverse events such as 2 being greater than 1 and 3 being greater than 2. Since if these are events they seem to occur at every place or else at no place, (1) would also have the consequence that they are identical. But it is not clear that there are events such as these.

18 “Identity Conditions for Events”, p. 331.

19 For an exception, see “Particulars, Events, and Actions”, pp. 149-150.

20 “Identity Conditions for Events”, p. 334. See also “Particulars, Events, and Actions”, p. 148.

21 “Identity Conditions for Events”, p. 334.

22 Brand contends that (4) implies that (E) and (F) are identical on the grounds that (E)+ and (F)+ are necessarily spatio-temporally coincident. But this claim may be mistaken, since nothing Brand has said rules out the possibility that (E)+ and (F)+ are in this world spatiotemporally coincident events involving the same person and property while in some other worlds (E)+ and (F)+ are not coincident. If this is a possibility, (4) does not even have the result Brand claims for it in this example.

23 We would like to thank the referee for this Journal for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.