Abstract
Events are things like explosions, floods, weddings or births. Both in common-sense and scientific usage, events are spatially and temporally bounded doings or happenings that involve activity and change. Philosophical theories of events have not, generally speaking, honored this feature of events. Probably the most widely discussed account, due to Jaegwon Kim, holds that events are exemplifications of properties at times. But properties are things like temperature, shape, color, solidity or fragility; they are not doings or happenings, but havings. In this paper I defend an account which takes seriously the distinction between doings and havings, which I call the object-activity theory of events. I argue that an event is not an object or objects exemplifying a property or relation, but instead an object or objects engaged in an activity or interaction.
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Notes
Kim’s original formulation of the account is his (Kim, 1969). My discussion of Kim’s theory draws on three essays, “Causation, Nomic Subsumption and the Concept of an Event” (1973), “Non-causal connections” (1974), and “Events as Property Exemplifications” (1976). These essays are reprinted in (Kim, 1993); my citations and page references are to these reprints.
It is a matter of controversy whether actions are just a subclass of events, in part because intentional omissions can be conceived as a kind of action, and omissions are not events. I will not wade into this argument here; my modest point is that the object-activity account I propose is ecumenical between agents and non-agents as participants in events.
The term ‘entity’ is now entrenched in the mechanisms literature as a term of art for what in the metaphysics literature are more commonly called ‘objects’ or ‘substances’. MDC’s use of the term ‘entity’ makes it challenging to discuss their position in relation to traditional metaphysical discussions, since in those discussions ‘entity’ is almost always used as a generic term for anything (objects, processes, properties, tropes, etc.) that someone might take to be part of an ontology. To try to minimize confusion I will in this paper use the term ‘object’ where MDC (and many philosophers who discuss mechanisms) use ‘entity’.
The relation between the causal-mechanistic approach of Salmon and the new mechanistic approach of MDC and Glennan is complicated. Both approaches see causal processes as central to guaranteeing productive continuity between cause and effect. And while Salmon distinguishes processes from interactions, treating interactions as intersections between processes, he was in fact well aware that interactions were not instantaneous, but had temporal and causal structure. For further discussion see (Campaner, 2013; Glennan, 2002, 2017).
But see (Steward, 2013) for a defense of the ontological import of this distinction.
See (Parsons, 1990, Chap. 9) for discussion of different ways of understanding this relation.
While pragmatic and explanatory considerations can often be used to disambiguate and pick out which activities, objects and events are of concern, I do not mean to imply that these considerations can resolve all vagueness concerning the boundaries of objects and events. These boundaries may be objectively indeterminate. For further discussion with respect to objects see (Glennan, 2021).
In one sense then, the stabbing is not the same event as the killing, since the stabbing is part of the killing and parts aren’t identical to wholes. What is going on here is an ambiguity between using the word ‘stabbing’ in the narrow sense of poking something into somebody’s body and in the broader sense of a kind of killing – a killing by stabbing. It is analogous to an ambiguity in my previous example between using the word ‘baking’ to refer to the entire process by which one transforms a set of ingredients into a loaf of bread, or the particular phase of the larger activity whereby dough is placed in an oven and baked. Care must be taken not to let these ambiguities mislead us.
My claim that there is only a single activity going on in a token event follows from a reading of the determinate/determinable relation in which determinables reduce to determinates on a given occasion. On non-reductionist views of this relation, you would have to have multiple more and less determinate activities associated with a single event. See (Wilson, 2020) for a discussion of the possibilities.
My point in this argument is only to show that it is our beliefs about derived events, rather than the events themselves, that are causally efficacious. This point does not imply that we can’t have causally efficacious beliefs about non-derived events, or that activities in non-derived events must be independent of belief or other intentional states. Clearly events like Ahmed and Beatrice getting married, or the bartender checking Cecily’s ID involve such states.
I take the idea that theories of causation fit mostly into these two buckets from James Woodward (e.g., 2016).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to for comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Ken Aizawa, Francesca Bellazzi, Toby Friend, Carl Gillett, Sam Kimpton-Nye, Max Kistler, Milenko Lasnibat, Vanessa Seiffert, and Tuomas Tahko. The final version benefited greatly from the detailed comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees.
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Glennan, S. The Object-Activity Theory of Events. Erkenn 89, 503–519 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00542-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00542-w