Abstract
Numerous authors have attempted to carve an ontological distinction between events and processes on the basis of a widely noted linguistic datum involving count and mass nouns, where events are thought to be analogous to countable objects while processes to non-countable stuff. By assessing the most developed of these proposals—that of Helen Steward’s—this paper locates the motivations behind the project of carving some such distinction between events and processes, and proceeds to offer considerations toward an alternative account of processes—one whose ontology is more akin to that of states than it is to stuff.
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Notes
Parsons (1990: §2) provides a concise summary of evidence in support of a Davidsonian semantics. I wish, however, to remain neutral about whether Davidsonian events are reducible to tropes, property exemplifications, etc. In addition, nothing that I will say here requires commitment to Davidson’s causal analysis of event identity.
Throughout this paper I ignore other uses of the progressive such as ones that refer to the start of a long-term process (e.g. ‘John is getting his DPhil’) or statements about states with indefinite terminations (e.g. ‘John is living with us’).
I ignore the complication that Crowther and Mourelatos conceive of processes more narrowly—as atelic happenings.
Assuming that we have but only one event involving the parachutist, namely a downwards spiralling, I have adduced three further reasons that seek to explain why we may be more tolerant of temporal co-location than we are of material co-location. First, our pre-theoretical conception of the physical world is filled with temporal co-locations: e.g. my strolling and whistling at the same time, my breathing and ageing at the same time. But cases of spatial co-location are, I suspect, motivated largely by philosophical analysis (about modality, say). Second, we perceive that a single thing can be the subject of two distinct happenings, but do not perceive that the same happening can be undergone by two distinct things that occupy the same space. For example, we perceive the parachutist’s falling and spiralling, but of a spinning top, do not also perceive the spinning of the putatively non-identical stuff that constitutes it. Third, temporal phenomena that are ‘subject-less’ provide us with a well-spring of examples involving temporal co-location: e.g. a region of space that is getting warmer, increasingly magnetised, undergoing thermal entropy, etc. (what this suggests is that the culprits of metaphysical co-location worries are space-occupying things).
In a footnote, Steward (2012: pp. 387–88, fn. 17) appears to be aware of this departure.
Consider another example. If Jutta is sparring with a Roman soldier, I will be saying something false should I utter ‘Jutta is wiping out the Roman army’, but I may be saying something true should I utter ‘Jutta is killing a Roman soldier’. The first utterance is false because it is physically unlikely for Jutta to wipe out the entire Roman army since she is an ordinary human being who whose health will deteriorate from exhaustion and injury. Similarly, it is false to utter ‘John is building a house’ if, given the presence of the quick-sand that threatens to swallow the house in the next minute it is physically unlikely that a house will eventually get built.
Much of the literature on the ‘imperfective paradox’ attempt to describe the epistemic and physical modalities that make it the case that utterances of the following sort can be simultaneously asserted: ‘John was building a house’ and ‘John did not (eventually) build a house’. For an influential proposal see Portner (1998: pp. 774–777).
In addition, an objection of Steward’s that Davidsonian events cannot account for ‘actions with what one might call a smooth change profile’ (2012: p. 379) might apply to her conception of processes since processes would also be graphically represented as the step-like diagram depicted in Fig. 2 of Steward’s paper (2012: p. 380), a representation Steward finds undesirable.
What Vendler ([1957] 1967) calls ‘activities’ are analogous to states in that the verb phrases that are used to describe these two categories are semantically ‘atelic’. My proposal differs from Vendler’s in that my processes can be picked out both by telic and atelic verb phrases just as long as these are in the progressive. In other words, while Vendler is more concerned about verb types I am more concerned about verb aspect. Nor is my proposal about the claim that some stative predications are almost synonymous with progressive constructions (e.g. ‘John is asleep/is sleeping’, ‘The socks are on the bed/are lying on the bed’). See also Galton (1984: p. 71).
The nominal ‘John’s building of a house’ is to be read mass-wise as a nominalization of the progressive ‘John is building a house’.
An anonymous reviewer suggested that the sentence on the right is acceptable since there is nothing wrong with ‘John’s being industrious lasted for only two years’? For readers who perceive the latter sentence as being idiomatic, this may be because we understand ‘being industrious’ to refer to activity or action that is industrious in manner and not the state of industriousness. I don’t deny that we can contrive an interpretive context in which ‘John’s being handsome lasted for two years’ will sound borderline acceptable, but it suffices for such tests that we need only detect an anomalous expression (and not a meaningless one). See Moltmann (2004) and Maeinborn (2007) for more ways of distinguishing between ‘X’s being φ’ and ‘X’s φ-ness’.
A criterion of identity for picnics might have it that a picnic at t1 is the same as that at t2 only if the picnickers are roughly the same, have gathered for the same purpose, etc. But this hardly tells us how many picnics there are in a given spatio-temporal region—which is the role of a criterion of individuation for picnics.
See Phillips (2010) for an application of this principle on temporal properties (e.g. musical succession).
It is unfortunate that the term ‘instantiation’ is used when talking about properties or attributes and kinds or sortals when, strictly speaking, it is only kinds or sortals that have countable instances.
I wish to leave it open that these facts may not be sufficient for Walking to be instantiated. This is because if Walking is a kind of action, one can imagine worlds in which such facts obtain but there is no Walking (e.g. if those bodily movements are reflex actions).
For we do say that states ‘obtain’, while events and processes ‘go on/unfold/occur’. Galton’s claim might require us to explain how it is that states in their aggregations ‘go on/unfold/occur’, and events/process in their parts ‘obtain’.
Steward’s objection is that given Stout’s terminology, the sentence ‘A comet hurtled into the sun’ quantifies over or picks out an event. But if it is true that a comet hurtled into the sun, then there must be some past time over which that (presumably non-instantaneous) event was happening. ‘But this is as much to say’, as Steward writes, ‘that any event quantified over by the sentence “A comet hurtled into the sun” was necessarily also a process… Any event that was ever happening was thereby also a process. And so how can event and process (thus conceived) be entirely distinct metaphysical categories?’ (2013: p. 784, emphasis in original).
See also Vendler (1984: p. 43) who distinguished between two modes of imagination.
For instance, Galton says ‘EXP is where change actually happens… [This] fits well with the picture painted by physics’ (2008: p. 333, my emphasis). At one point, Galton suggests the interesting claim that one perspective or ontological system is more basic than the other: ‘for if there were no processes in EXP, then HIST would be devoid of events’ (Ibid.: 334).
I am deeply grateful to the anonymous referees of this journal for their comments on an earlier draft of this work. My thanks also to Michael Martin (Oxford) and Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck): continuing with our conversations is a process that I wish to engage in someday.
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Zhou, Z. What the progressive aspect tells us about processes. Synthese 198, 267–293 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01999-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01999-5