Abstract
Starting with the example of irreducible quantum events, it is shown that other kinds of events also have an element of randomness. The hallmark of “genuine” events is their irreducibility to some previous conditions. A connection between this concept and the traditional notion of contingency is explored. This concept is further brought in connection with Peirce’s Firstness. Such a notion raises the problem of how to understand causation. It seems that causes deal with individual happenings. In fact, laws are only general, while causal explanations necessarily involve localization in space and time and therefore indexical connection with events. When we deal with causes, we necessarily deal with their effects, which are shifted in space and delayed in time and so do not reveal the singularity of the event that is at the origin of the process. Our descriptions of events are really about the effects of the events, not the events themselves. This helps us to define what events are in all generality: an event is what cannot be fully described by our means although we have reason to assume that it is real.
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Notes
A. S. Eddington, Philosophy of Physical Science 1939: 162–163 seems to agree on this point when he says that existence (“actuality,” in our parlance) is a kind of monadic relation or a structure without structure. The only point is that we would avoid the notion of “structural concept of existence” and speak rather of “dynamical concept of existence”.
Obviously, if we like to do this generalization, we need to interpret St Thomas’ statement as dealing with efficient but not formal causes: in fact, if the latter would be absent, an event would be a creation from nothing. On the relation between the notion of contingency and quantum mechanics, see Auletta 2009b.
The different possible worlds emerge due to the different relations of compatibility and incompatibility among possible beings and their properties: J. Duns Scot, Ordinatio I, d. 43. On these problems see G. Auletta 1994 , Chap. 4.
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Auletta, G., Torcal, L. Chance and Events: The Way in Which Nature Surprises Us. Biosemiotics 7, 335–350 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9205-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9205-0