States of affairs constitute a basic ontological category in Chisholm's metaphysical system, and yield events and propositions as subclasses. Qua events, they enter into causal relations, and qua propositions, they are objects of our intentional attitudes. This paper expounds and critically examines Chisholm's conception of a state of affairs and his constructions of events and propositions. Various difficulties with some of Chisholm's definitions and procedures are pointed out and discussed. The last section contains a (...) set of suggested modifications to the theory to avoid these difficulties. (shrink)

States of affairs constitute a basic ontological category in Chisholm's metaphysical system, and yield events and propositions as subclasses. Qua events, they enter into causal relations, and qua propositions, they are objects of our intentional attitudes. This paper expounds and critically examines Chisholm's conception of a state of affairs and his constructions of events and propositions. Various difficulties with some of Chisholm's definitions and procedures are pointed out and discussed. The last section contains a (...) set of suggested modifications to the theory to avoid these difficulties. (shrink)

States of affairs constitute a basic ontological category in Chisholm's metaphysical system, and yield events and propositions as subclasses. Qua events, they enter into causal relations, and qua propositions, they are objects of our intentional attitudes. This paper expounds and critically examines Chisholm's conception of a state of affairs and his constructions of events and propositions. Various difficulties with some of Chisholm's definitions and procedures are pointed out and discussed. The last section contains a (...) set of suggested modifications to the theory to avoid these difficulties. (shrink)

"Possibilism" is the view that among the things that there are, or which have being»are included individual objects which do not exist, although they conceivably could have existed, and would have existed if certain possible-but-unrealized states of affairs had obtained. In this paper I try to develop a plausible ontological context from which the possibilist thesis could be deduced. Among the assumptions that are required for the argument is the idea that a state of affairs is a (...) complex entity individuated by its constituents and their arrangement in that state of affairs. This is contrasted with Chisholm's strategy for individuating states of affairs. If one also assumes that possible states of affairs have their status as possibilities as a matter of logical necessity, then it is shown how a possibilist could argue that non-existent objects would have being as constituents of possible-but- non-obtaining states of affairs. In particular, possibilism could be seen as the view that the being of non-existent objects is required as an ontological ground of the possiblity of there having existed objects other than those things that do actually exist. (shrink)

Despite heroic efforts, philosophers have found it increasingly difficult to evade discussion of metaphysical topics. Take the philosophy of mind. Take, in particular, the mind-body problem in its latest guise: the problem of causal relevance. If mental properties are not reducible to physical properties, how can we reconcile the role such properties seem to have in producing bodily motions that constitute actions with the apparent fact that the very same motions are entirely explicable on the basis of purely physical properties (...) of purely physical events in the nervous system? Familiar approaches to the problem include appeals to “supervenient causation,” to “higher-level” laws governing putatively higher-level entities and events, and to “realizing” relations that make room in objects for overlapping properties. (shrink)

Chisholm's ontological objective is the reductionist one of translating statements which appear to be about propositions and generic events into statements about states of affairs, denying the existence of concrete events altogether. The paper questions this program by criticising the notion of concretization on which Chisholm heavily relies. It is argued that there are no convincing arguments in favor of eliminative reductionism. Translability of statements about one kind of entity into statements about another kind of (...) entity has nothing to do with what exists. (shrink)

Chisholm's ontological objective is the reductionist one of translating statements which appear to be about propositions and generic events into statements about states of affairs, denying the existence of concrete events altogether. The paper questions this program by criticising the notion of concretization on which Chisholm heavily relies. It is argued that there are no convincing arguments in favor of eliminative reductionism. Translability of statements about one kind of entity into statements about another kind of (...) entity has nothing to do with what exists. (shrink)

Armstrong appeals to the existence of totalities in order to solve the problem of negative truths. The totality of first-order states of affairs is a truthmaker for all negative truths, but it involves things which are irrelevant to many such truths. To solve this problem, Armstrong claimed that negative truths have minimal truthmakers which usually consist in totalities smaller than the totality of first-order states of affairs. Merricks objects to this claim by arguing that given Armstrong’s (...) definition of minimal truthmakers, the totality of first-order states of affairs is a minimal truthmaker for every negative truth. In this article, I respond to Merricks’s objection. I will first show that the definition of minimal truthmakers that he proposes is not plausible. However, Merricks’s objection, I will argue, also works on the standard definition of minimal truthmakers. I will then show that for independent reasons, the standard definition should be revised, and, given my revised definition, Merricks’s objection fails. (shrink)

State of affairs (Sachverhalt) is one of the few terms in philosophy, which only came into use for the first time in the twentieth century, mainly via the works of Husserl and Wittgenstein. This makes the task of finding out who introduced this concept into philosophy, and in exactly what sense, of considerable interest. Our thesis is that Lotze introduced the term in 1874 in the sense of the objective content of judgments, which is ipso facto the minimal (...) structured ontological unit. We would argue against authors such as Michael Dummett and Barry Smith, who have tried to prove that Lotze's theory of judgment, and so of states of affairs, was ad-vanced in the wake of psychologism. (shrink)

The notion of state of affairs was introduced as the complexly signifiable in the Late Scholasticism and rediscovered by Logicians like Bolzano and Frege. While Bolzano and Frege were primarily interested in the nature of objective truths students of Brentano, among others Meinong, Twardowski and Husserl, developed similar concepts starting out with an interest in the nature of mental acts and judgement. Both Frege's and Meinong's conceptions face similar problems concerning complex referents which are diagnosed to stem from (...) confusions of complexes of properties with complex properties. (shrink)

The notion of state of affairs was introduced as the complexly signifiable in the Late Scholasticism and rediscovered by Logicians like Bolzano and Frege. While Bolzano and Frege were primarily interested in the nature of objective truths students of Brentano, among others Meinong, Twardowski and Husserl, developed similar concepts starting out with an interest in the nature of mental acts and judgement. Both Frege's and Meinong's conceptions face similar problems concerning complex referents which are diagnosed to stem from (...) confusions of complexes of properties with complex properties. (shrink)

In order to perceive something, one must have a sense experience which it causes and which has a content that fits it appropriately. But veridical hallucinations show that more is required, viz., that the experience must also be caused by the object of perception in the right sort of way. The best account of what this amounts to is that the object causes the experience by means of a “reliable mechanism,” i.e., a causal mechanism which is generally apt to connect (...) objects to experiences with contents that fit those objects. The paper advances and defends a careful account of this position and its application to the distinction between state of affairs perception, event perception and thing perception. (shrink)

States of affairs raise, among others, the following questions: What kind of entity are they (if there are any)? Are they contingent, causally efficacious, spatio-temporal and perceivable entities, or are they abstract objects? What are their constituents and their identity conditions? What are the functions that states of affairs are able to fulfil in a viable theory, and which problems and prima facie counterintuitive consequences arise out of an ontological commitment to them? Are there merely possible (...) (non-actual, non-obtaining) states of affairs? Are there molecular (i.e., negative, conjunctive, disjunctive etc.) states of affairs? Are there modal and tensed states of affairs? In this volume, these and other questions are addressed by David M. Armstrong, Marian David, Herbert Hochberg, Uwe Meixner, L. Nathan Oaklander, Peter Simons, Erwin Tegtmeier and Mark Textor. (shrink)

In one of its latest papers Timothy Williamson has drawn a distinction between two readings of the phrase "possible F", where "F" is a predicate variable: the predicative and the attributive. In what follows, on the one hand I will hold that the first reading naturally applies to the phrase "possible object", thereby supporting a moderata conception of possibilia as entities that possibly exist. Moreover, I will maintain that one such conception provides the best possible account of Tractarian objects. On (...) the other hand, I will claim that the second reading of the phrase "possible state of affairs" supports a parsimonious ontology of states of affairs, according to which a possible state of affairs is nothing over and above the de re possibility its constituents have of being related in a certain way to each other. As a result facts, i.e. possible states of affairs actually obtaining, are the only genuine states of affairs that there are, or, to put it differently, for any given state of affairs it is redundant that it is a fact. Besides, I will also claim that, appearances notwithstanding, this ontology of Sachverhalten underlies the Tractatus itself. Finally, I will try to show how, again appearances notwithstanding, this thrifty ontology of Sachverhalten squares with the semantic theses of the Tractatus according to which an elementary proposition presents a possible state of affairs as its sense and it is true if ‘that’ possible states of affairs obtains. (shrink)

I develop new paths to the existence of a concrete necessary being. These paths assume a metaphysical framework in which there are abstract states of affairs that can obtain or fail to obtain. One path begins with the following causal principle: necessarily, any contingent concrete object possibly has a cause. I mark out steps from that principle to a more complex causal principle and from there to the existence of a concrete necessary being. I offer a couple alternative (...) causal principles and paths, too. The paths marked out rely on relatively modest causal principles and avoid many obstacles that traditional cosmological arguments face. (shrink)

This chapter considers the ‘hosting question’ of how immanent universals, in contrast to transcendent universals, are ‘brought down to earth’ from ‘Plato’s heaven’. It explores the thesis that the hosting amounts to their being constituents of the states of affairs that result from their instantiations. These states of affairs are concrete complexes consisting of particulars and universals, and perhaps something that links them together. The traditional view that immanent universals are concrete is briefly defended against a (...) recent prominent objection. On relationalism, states of affairs are unified by a relation of some sort; on non-relationalism they are unified non-relationally. Roughly, these two conceptions of states of affairs are equivalent to Armstrong’s relational and non-relational versions of immanent realism, respectively. Armstrong mostly criticises the former and defends the latter. It is argued, however, that relationalism, at least potentially, answers the hosting question, whereas non-relationalism realism does not. (shrink)

If one takes seriously the idea that a scientific language must be extensional, and accepts Quine’s notion of truth-value-related extensionality, and also recognizes that a scientific language must allow for singular terms that do not refer to existing objects, then there is a problem, since this combination of assumptions must be inconsistent. I will argue for a particular solution to the problem, namely, changing what is meant by the word ‘extensionality’, so that it would not be the truth-value that had (...) to be preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions, but the state of affairs that the sentence described. The question is whether or not elementary sentences containing empty singular terms, such as ‘Vulcan rotates’, are extensional in the substitutivity sense. Five conditions are specified under which extensionality in the substitutivity sense of such sentences can be secured. It is demonstrated that such sentences are state-of-affairs-as-extension-related extensional. This implies that such sentences are also truth-value-related extensional in Quine’s sense, but not truth-value-as-extension-related extensional. (shrink)

IntroductionKraut defines absolute goodness as follows: for something to be absolutely good is for its goodness to be unrelated to the needs or interests of any individual.See Richard Kraut, Against Absolute Goodness , pp. 4ff. Let’s allow goodness to apply broadly to objects, states of affairs and events . Treat x as a variable ranging over these categories. Then, to say that x is absolutely good in this sense is to say that a world containing x is (...) better than a world in which x is absent, whether or not x contributes, in that world, to the satisfaction of anyone’s needs or interests. For example, to say that the Bamiyan Buddhas are absolutely good is to claim that a world in which all sentient life has be .. (shrink)

Here I compare two accounts of metaphysical indeterminacy (MI): first, the 'meta-level' approach described by Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron in the companion to this paper, on which every state of affairs (SOA) is itself precise/determinate, and MI is a matter of its being indeterminate which determinate SOA obtains; second, my preferred 'object-level' determinable-based approach, on which MI is a matter of its being determinate---or just plain true---that an indeterminate SOA obtains, where an indeterminate SOA is one whose constitutive (...) object has a determinable property, but no unique determinate of that determinable. In S1, I first note an important difference between our accounts, concerning whether MI is taken to induce propositional indeterminacy; in S2, I highlight and defend certain advantages of my account; in S3, I address certain of Barnes and Cameron's objections to my account. (shrink)

The search for the extensions of sentences can be guided by Frege’s “principle of compositionality of extension”, according to which the extension of a composed expression depends only on its logical form and the extensions of its parts capable of having extensions. By means of this principle, a strict criterion for the admissibility of objects as extensions of sentences can be derived: every object is admissible as the extension of a sentence that is preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions. (...) The question is: what are the extensions of elementary sentences containing empty singular terms, like ‘Vulcan rotates’. It can be demonstrated that in such sentences, states of affairs as structured objects (but not truth-values) are preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions. Hence, such states of affairs are admissible (while truth-values are not) as extensions of elementary sentences containing empty singular terms. (shrink)

It is shown that two arguments given by Alvin Plantinga, which he offers to refute the existentialist thesis that propositions, states of affairs, and properties are ontologically dependent upon the objects they are directly about, are unsound. The existentialist position is then defended on the basis of both some intuitive considerations and a rigorous argument that does not presuppose any particular theory of the nature of propositions, states of affairs, and properties.

Ingarden’s official ontology of states of affairs is by no means reductionist. According to him there are states of affairs, but they are ontologically dependent onother entities. There are certain classical arguments for the introduction of states of affairs as extra entities over and above the nominal objects, that can be labelled “the problem of composition,” “the problem of relation” and “the problem of negation.” To the first two Ingarden proposes rather traditional solutions, while (...) his treatment of negation proves to be original and interesting. Ingarden doesn’t deny the existence of negative states of affairs altogether, but he (i) accepts only a restricted group of them and (ii) ascribes to them an extremely weak mode of being. Negative states of affairs are construed as supervenient entities, and their supervenience-basis involves two factors: on the one hand the appropriate positive states of affairs, and on the other hand certain mental acts of conscious subjects. They enjoy thus a curious “half-subjective” mode of being. (shrink)

It is shown that two arguments given by Alvin Plantinga, which he offers to refute the existentialist thesis that propositions, states of affairs, and properties are ontologically dependent upon the objects they are directly about, are unsound. The existentialist position is then defended on the basis of both some intuitive considerations and a rigorous argument that does not presuppose any particular theory of the nature of propositions, states of affairs, and properties.

This article claims that events, facts and states of affairs need to be differentiated. It takes as a starting point Chisholm’s claim that only his ontology of states of affairs explains effectively thirteen sentences related to propositions and events. He does this by reducing propositions and events to states of affairs. We argue that our ontology also solves those problems. We defend a hierarchized Platonist ontology that has concrete entities and abstract (...) entities. The distinctions we propose allow us to explain the pre-analytic data analyzed by Chisholm without reducing entities. We claim that our ontology provides a different way of explaining that data, and is, thus, promissory. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “What Can the Global Observer Know?” by Diana Gasparyan. Upshot: While I agree with Gasparyan’s incisive critique of the concept of the “general observer,” her use of the concept of “event” is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, she equates “events” to Wittgenstein’s and “configurations of objects” or “states of affairs” and she consider the world as a collection of such states of affairs. On the other hand, she cites (...) Badiou’s work in support of her criticism of the “general observer.” Yet Badiou’s conception of events is very different from Wittgenstein’s: they are locally produced by historically situated agents in their concrete inter-subjective activities. I argue that a resolution of the target article’s ambiguity in favour of Badiou’s conception of events would allow constructivism to escape a narrow epistemological reading of its basic thesis in favor of a broader interpretation. (shrink)

Purpose: The primary objective of this study was to determine the role of church in state and public affairs during the Kibaki Era, 2002-2013Methodology: The methodology employed in this study was qualitative in nature. The study relied mainly on the analysis of an existing dataset from secondary sources. The data was gathered from technical reports, scholarly journals, reference books, past sermons, church publications, official and unofficial doctrine, theologies and from the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi. Other sources of (...) data collection for the study included official statistics collected by government and the various agencies, bureaus and departments. The target population for this study was the mainland churches in Kenya and the role these churches played in state and public affairs in Kenya between 2002 and 2007.Results: The Kibaki era has been characterized by many an events that have attracted by far and wide the attention of the clergy. In 2005, the most significant development of the 2005 constitutional referendum is not the defeat of the draft, but the emergence of strains and tensions not just between Christians and Muslims, but also between church and state. Another significant development was the fact that the mainline clergy were increasingly viewed as partisan and divided along ethnic lines and serving narrow political interest depending on the ethnic group to which its leaders belonged. The prophetic role and voice of the church to act as the conscience of society was lost, and the church did nothing to evaluate its own role even after the people voted to soundly reject the draft constitution.Unique contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The study recommended that the government should put in place laws that would involve the church in government matters. This can be done by introducing motions into parliament that advocate for the direct involvement of the church. This would involve laws which ensure that a portion of all members sitting in any committee represents the church. This can also be done by the introduction of electoral posts for church representatives just as there are positions for women representatives. The study also recommends that amendments be made to the constitution to make a legal requirement that one of the nominated MPs must be from the church. (shrink)

The philosophical problem of the correspondence between what we think, what we say and 'what there is' is a perennial one. At the beginning of the Sophistical Refutations (1, 165a7-9), for example, Aristotle gives a synthetic formulation of it: since 'it is impossible in a discussion to bring in the actual things discussed: we use their names as symbols instead of them; and we suppose that what follows in the names, follows in the things as well' (Aristotle 1984, I, 278). (...) But whereas this diffi culty pertains to language (or thought) in general, it becomes remarkably acute when the linguistic expressions at stake are not simple names, but bearers of truth and falsity, namely, statements or, to use the medieval word for it, propositions. Th is chapter addresses the following question: did medieval authors consider that just as names signify things, propositions, too, are semantically related to special objects-- and if so, what kind of things did they think those special objects are? I shall begin with two short introductory remarks about the notion of state of aff airs (SOA) as well as the identifi cation criteria for the theories describing them before the technical category of SOA was coined (Sections 1 and 2); I shall then give a survey of the fi ve main types of medieval answers given to the question of the nature of SOAs (Section 3); fi nally, I shall briefl y compare the medieval conceptions with (some) later, that is late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, as well as contemporary theories of SOAs (Section 4). (shrink)

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they (...) play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events. -/- We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between a perception-action system and a perception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I call where-beliefs and when-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anderson claims that states of affairs are merely extrinsically valuable, since we value them only in virtue of the intrinsically valuable persons in those states of affairs. Since it considers states of affairs to be the sole bearers of intrinsic value, Anderson argues that consequentialism is incoherent because it attempts to globally maximize extrinsic value. I respond to this objection by distinguishing between two forms of consequentialist teleology and arguing that Anderson''s claim is (...) either harmless or her argument for the claim is uncompelling. On the first conception of teleology, consequentialists need not hold that states of affairs are the sole bearers of intrinsic value, which allows them to deflect this criticism. On the second account of teleology, even assuming that states of affairs are the sole bearers of intrinsic value, Anderson''s argument does not necessarily defeat such views. (shrink)

The critical realist conception of open and closed systems is not about systems: it is about regularities in the flux of events and states of affairs. It has recently been criticised on the grounds that critical realists should take on board ideas about the general nature of systems; recognise that genuinely open social systems would be impossible; avoid polarities or dualisms where either there are event regularities and open systems, or there are no event regularities and closed (...) systems and accept partial regularities and partially open systems; and understand that orthodox economics is not based upon event regularities, laws or Humean empiricism. The objective of this paper is to ‘take stock’ of these recent criticisms. (shrink)

Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to a fact -- a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20 th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). During the (...) last 2300 years this basic idea has been expressed in many ways, resulting in a rather extended family of views, theories, and theory sketches. The members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences. (shrink)

Minimally, causal realism (as understood here) is the view that accounts of causation in terms of mere, regular or probabilistic conjunction are unsatisfactory, and that causal phenomena are correctly associated with some form of de re necessity. Classic arguments, however, some of which date back to Sextus Empiricus and have appeared many times since, including famously in Russell, suggest that the very notion of causal realism is incoherent. In this paper I argue that if such objections seem compelling, it is (...) only because everyday expressions concerning causal phenomena are misleading with respect to certain metaphysical details. These expressions generally make reference to the relations of events or states of affairs, but ignore or obscure the role played by causal properties. I argue that on a proposed alternative, an analysis in terms of causal processes, more refined descriptions of causal phenomena escape the charge of incoherence. Causal necessity is here located in the relations of causal properties. I distinguish this view from the recent process theories of Salmon and Dowe, which are disinterested in causal realism. (shrink)

The article looks at sport as a form of human action where the participants display various forms of Intentionality. Intentionality may be defined as ‘that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world.’ Sporting actions are about human intentions, beliefs, desires, perceptions and not to forget, movements. This means that sports typically display what we call ‘Intentionality.’ The study of (...) Intentionality and intentional actions has previously received relatively little attention among sport philosophers, but deserves more attention. Even though there is a tension and several differences between continental and analytical approaches to philosophical problems, there is a common understanding of the phenomenon we call ‘Intentionality.’ The debate between John Searle, representing the analytical camp, and Hubert Dreyfus, representing the phenomenological camp, is instructive to see the differences, and also the commonalities between the two approaches. The article starts with a clarification of the concept of Intentionality and sketches some of the history and background of the concept. It then presents the main conceptual framework that Searle uses to distinguish the different types and forms of Intentionality and his views on sporting actions. This is followed by a presentation of the phenomenological approach of Dreyfus and the response by Searle. The article ends by discussing the possibility of a combined and enriched view where a clarification of the logic as well as the phenomenology of sporting actions is needed. It may thus be possible to bridge the gap between the two approaches. (shrink)

Causation: A Realist Approach Traditional empiricist accounts of causation and laws of nature have been reductionist in the sense of entailing that given a complete specification of the non-causal properties of and relations among particulars, it is therefore logically determined both what laws there are and what events are causally related. It is argued here, however, that reductionist accounts of causation and of laws of nature are exposed to decisive objections, and thus that the time has come for empiricists (...) to break with that tradition. -/- The basic goal of this book, therefore, is to set out and defend realistic accounts of those concepts. In the case of causal relations, for example, Tooley maintains that causation is basically a matter of theoretical relations between states of affairs that underlie and explain relative frequencies. He also argues that such an approach avoids the objections that tell against reductionist accounts and that it does so without making causal relations epistemologically inaccessible. (shrink)

An account of events is developed in which events are characterized as a series of momentary states of affairs. This characterization is motivated by a study of the structural features required to capture our notion of an event. Events have structure in the sense that they involve objects and properties, and, since they necessarily occur over an interval of time, events have a transtemporal structure. This latter feature is used to account for a variety (...) of relationships between events, as well as distinctions between states, processes, and completable events. Special attention is given to the problem of event identity. Some progress is made on this issue by laying the groundwork which is necessary for its resolution. This consists, first of all, in sorting out various cases of identity, e.g. distinguishing between the problems of adverbial modification and property identity, and, secondly, in providing a metaphysical framework within which to interpret the problem of event identity. (shrink)

The B-theory of time holds that McTaggart’s A-series of past, present, and future is reducible to the B-series of events running from earlier to later. According to the date-theory—originally put forth by J.J.C. Smart and later endorsed by by D.H. Mellor—the truth conditions of tensed or Asentence-tokens can be given in terms of tenseless or B-sentences and, therefore, A-sentence-tokens do not ascribe any A-determinations of pastness, presentness, or futurity. However, as Nathan Oaklander has argued, the date-theory does not provide (...) an adequate analysis of the ontological truth conditions of irreducible A-propositions. I show that the co-reporting theory—which holds that for every A-sentence-token there is a B-sentence that differs in sense but reports the same event or state of affairs—escapes the objections Oaklander has addressed against the date-theory. (shrink)

How are causal relations between particular states of affairs related to causal laws? There appear to be three main answers to this question, and the choice among those three alternatives would seem to be crucial for any account of causation. In spite of this fact, the question of which view is correct has been all but totally neglected in present-day discussions. Indeed, since the time of Hume, one answer has more or less dominated philosophical thinking about causation. This (...) is the view that causal relations between events/states of affairs logically supervene upon causal laws plus non-causal states of affairs. In this paper, I shall attempt to show that the view in question is exposed to decisive objections,. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that constant conjunction is a necessary condition for a proposit'2on such as 'Every A is a B' being a law) That is each A is also a B (where A and B are kinds of events, objects states of affairs, or whatever) or the property of being an A is always conjoined with the property of being a B. It is also widely agreed that this cannot be the whole story. How can we (...) distinguish accidental generalisations from laws? Why is it that 'Every massive object attracts every other massive object' is taken as a law, while 'Every golden object is less than a million kilograms (say) in mass' is not? Both are true universally, do not make reference to particular entities or places or times, and so on and so forth, and yet they are given vastly different ontological and/or epistemic status. This is the problem of laws. (shrink)

With the aim of giving a naturalistic foundation to the notion of mental representation, Fred Dretske (1981;1988) has put forward and developed the idea that the relation between a representation and its intentional content is grounded on an informational relation. In this explanatory model, mental representations are conceived of as states of organisms which a learning process has selected to play a functional role: a necessary condition for fulfilling this role is that the organism or some proper part of (...) it (presumably situated in the brain) is a natural indicator of the occurrence of a determinate type of event in the environment of the organism (or in the organism but outside of the proper part serving as the indicator). A state of the organism is a natural indicator of a type of event if and only if it carries information about the occurrence of that type of event. Jerry Fodor (1987) has devised and followed another strategy which consists in considering the relation between a mental representation and its intentional object as a relation of lawful, or nomic, dependence. A representational state of an organism has an objective content in virtue of the existence of a relation of nomic dependence between this state - presumably a property of the brain of the organism - and some objective property in the world. This dependence also creates a regular correlation between the occurrences of representational states of a certain type and the states of affairs whose type is their representational content. Both approaches encounter indeterminacy problems: for each, there exist situations in which the explanatory model chosen - information flow or nomic dependence - does not succeed in selecting, purely on the basis of the constraints characteristic of that model, one out of several potential contents for a given representational state. In such cases, that state is related to more than one type of events in accordance with the informational or nomic constraints imposed by those theories. In what follows, I examine an attempt by Pierre Jacob (1997) to solve two problems of indeterminacy threatening the informational theory of mental representation. According to Jacob, one of these problems can be solved with the help of the distinction between the source which is the target of the information and the channel over which the information is transmitted, whereas the solution to the other problem requires the introduction of the concept of function. I shall begin with a consideration of the distinction, with respect to a situation of information transmission, between the source and the channel. I argue that both the source and the channel, and thus the information transmitted, depend not only on the external situation which characterises the source, the channel and the receiving organism, but also on the previous knowledge and the informational needs of the receiver. I then try to show that this relativity of information undermines the solution Jacob proposes to one of the problems of indeterminacy of representational content. Finally, I examine the possibility considered by Dretske and Jacob to solve this 'problem of the reference class' due to the mentioned relativity of information, by grounding the flow of information on lawful dependence instead of statistical dependence. I shall propose two arguments showing first that these two groundings are not equivalent and second that nomic dependence is inappropriate as a grounding for information flow. I conclude by suggesting that the problem of the reference class can be solved within the framework of the informational approach, on the condition of enriching it with functional considerations. (shrink)

How are causal relations between particular states of affairs related to causal laws? There appear to be three main answers to this question, and the choice among those three alternatives would seem to be crucial for any account of causation. In spite of this fact, the question of which view is correct has been all but totally neglected in present-day discussions. Indeed, since the time of Hume, one answer has more or less dominated philosophical thinking about causation. This (...) is the view that causal relations between events/states of affairs logically supervene upon causal laws plus non-causal states of affairs. In this paper, I shall attempt to show that the view in question is exposed to decisive objections. (shrink)

Los análisis de Adolf Reinach, fenomenólogo de la primera hora, acerca de los estados de cosas negativos se enmarcan dentro de la problemática más general de la relación entre Lógica y Ontología. Su idea de una teoría a priori del objeto, en cuanto disciplina que debe estudiar todas las clases posibles de objetos, le llevó al descubrimiento de una región de entidades revestidas de una necesidad interna y de una inteligibilidad incomparable que constituyen la esfera de lo a priori en (...) sentido propio. Esta labor de Reinach conlleva (a) una ampliación de la esfera de lo a priori, la cual va más allá de lo meramente formal y (b) una lucha contra la subjetivización de esta esfera. La temprana muerte de Reinach en el frente durante la Primera Gran Guerra le impidió la sistematización de muchas de sus consideraciones. En este trabajo se reconstruye críticamente su teoría de los estados de cosas negativos y se plantean las líneas centrales de la crítica realizada por Roman Ingarden. Reinach’s analysis on negative states of affairs belongs to the more general issue of the relationships between Logic and Ontology. His idea of an a priori theory of object, which task is to study all the possible kinds of objects, leads him to discover a region of entities which have an inner necessity and a incomparable intelligibility and which constitute the region of the a priori in the proper sense. This involves (a) an enlargement of the sphere of the a priori, which goes farther than the merely formal and (b) a criticism of those positions which have as consequence a subjectivization od this sphere. Reinach died during the First World War at an early age and could not systematize some of his profound and insightful analysis. This paper offers a critical presentation of his theory of negative states of affairs taking into account Roman Ingarden ’s comments. (shrink)

An instance of retrowareness is a veridical nonperceptual occurrent awareness of something about a particular past event or state of affairs. Accordingly, this occurrence is intentional, or exemplifies the property of intentionality, in the sense that it is as though it were about something in contrast to other equally intentional mental occurrences that only seem to be about something. That a retrowareness has intentionality must be explained in terms of its own content and structure, rather than in terms of (...) its success in being about an actual past state of affairs or event. Such an explanation will help explain (a) how a retrowareness succeeds in being about its intentional object and (b) how mental occurrences lacking an intentional object may possess an intentional character. (shrink)

Several debates in contemporary metaphysics provoke us to ask what an event is. One theory, Pioneered by chisholm, Develops the analogy between the occurrence of events and the truth of corresponding propositions. I call these propositional analyses. It is unclear whether their adherents wish to jettison our event-Concepts, And replace them with concepts from another category, Such as semantics. The other theory of what events are that I scrutinize, Namely kim's and goldman's property-Exemplification analysis, Seems reductive. My suspicion (...) is that if you attempt to boil down the occurrence of an event to the "obtaining" or "taking place" of a proposition-Like "state of affairs"--Or to the "exemplification" of a property by an "object"--At some "time", We have a residual event: a mysterious episode of "obtaining" or "exemplifying" in which either states of affairs or properties and objects participate. Reduction is unlikely. (shrink)

In his article, ‘What's Wrong with Tooley's Argument from Evil?’, Calum Miller's goal was to show that the evidential argument from evil that I have advanced is unsound, and in support of that claim, Miller set out three main objections. First, he argued that I had failed to recognize that the actual occurrence of an event can by itself, at least in principle, constitute good evidence that it was not morally wrong for God to allow events of the kind (...) in question. Miller's second objection was then that, in attempting to show that it is unlikely that God exists, I had failed to consider either positive arguments in support of the existence of God or possible theodicies, and thus that I was unjustified in drawing any conclusions concerning the probability that theism is true in the light of the total evidence available. Miller's third and final objection was that one of the approaches to logical probability that I employed – namely, that based upon a structure-description equiprobability principle, rather than a state-description equiprobability principle – was unsound since it has clearly unacceptable implications. In response, I argue that all three of Miller's objections are unsound. The third objection, however, is nevertheless important since it shows that my type of argument from evil cannot be based merely on the evils found in the world. One must also consider good states of affairs, and their relations to bad ones. I show, however, that that deficiency can be addressed in a completely satisfactory manner. (shrink)

The paper argues that the basic objects of perception are particulars, tropes in particular. It defends this view by proposing a response to the objection that we cannot perceive particulars without perceiving that it is so-and-so.