FACT PROPOSnITON EVENT Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy Volume 66 Managing Editors GENNARO CHlERClllA, University ofM ilan PAULINE JACOBSON, Brown University FRANCIS 1. PELLETIER, University ofA lberta Editorial Board JOHAN V AN BENTHEM, University ofA msterdam GREGORY N. CARLSON, University ofR ochester DAVID DOwrY, Ohio State University, Columbus GERALD GAZDAR, University of Sussex, Brighton IRENE HElM, M.LT., Cambridge EWA N KLEIN, University ofE dinburgh BILL LADUSAW , University ofC alifornia at Santa Cruz TERRENCE PARSONS, University ofC alifornia, Irvine The titles published in this series are listed at the end a/this volume. FACT PROPOSITION EVENT by PHILIP L. PETERSON Department ofP hilosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, U.S.A. Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-90-481-4856-1 ISBN 978-94-015-8959-8 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-94-015-8959-8 © 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1997 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. To Chris Table of Contents Preface ................................................ ix Introduction ............................................ 1 Part I. On Facts and Propositions Chapter 1: How to Infer Belief from Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 37 Chapter 2: Propositions and the Philosophy of Language ............ 43 Part II. On Events Chapter 3: On Representing Event Reference .................... 65 Chapter 4: Event ........................................ 91 Chapter 5: What Causes Effects? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 105 Chapter 6: Anaphoric Reference to Facts, Propositions, and Events .... 129 Part III. On Complex Events Chapter 7: The Natural Logic of Complex Event Expressions . . . . . . .. 175 Chapter 8: Complex Events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 181 Part IV. On Actions and "Cause"s Chapter 9: The Grimm Events of Causation .................... 205 Chapter 10: Four Grammatical Hypotheses on Actions, Causes, and "Causes" .......................................... 217 Chapter 11: Causation Agency, and Natural Actions .............. 251 Part V. On Causation Statements and Laws Chapter 12: Facts, Events and Semantic Emphasis in Causal Statements. 275 Chapter 13: Which Universals are Natural Laws? ................ 295 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 311 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 395 Index ............................................... 409 Preface In 20th century philosophy, facts, propositions, and events have each been utilized with significant effects. Facts are assigned an ontological priority in the logical atomisms of Russell and Wittgenstein. Events are central to Whiteheadian 'process metaphysics' as well as to more recent analyses of causation and human action. Propositions (and especially today 'propositional contents') have been of central concern to logical semanticists (from Carnap to Kaplan) as well as to epistemologists (from Russell to Chisholm and Dretske) and cognitive scientists (Fodor, Dennett). In all of this philosophical work and worry, there has been an appropriate concern for linguistic phenomena related to the postulation of these entities (facts, proposition, and events). Indeed, most of the analyses are explicitly part of a language- oriented style of 'doing philosophy' (whether of the earlier logic- and-language sort of Russell through Carnap, the 'ordinary language' emphasis of Ryle and Strawson, or the 'speech act' varieties of Austin and Grice). Given how very linguistical the philosophical attention to facts, propositions, and events has been, it is somewhat of a surprise (i) that philosophers have not made more use of results and theories from empirical linguistic science and (ii) that a concern for facts, propositions, and events is rare within empirical linguistics (in grammatical theory and natural language semantics). Still, attention to facts, propositions, and events has not been completely absent in linguistics--e.g., to facts by the Kiparskys in the '60s and, in recent years, to events by Terence Parsons. And, very recently, interest in facts, proposi- tions, and events emerged in linguistics at the Conference on Facts and Events in the Semantics of Natural Language organized by F. Pianesi and A. Varzi at the Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Povo(Trento), Italy, 29-30 August 1995. Over the last 25 years, I have pursued various problems and questions about facts, proposition, and events. My analyses when considered together do add up to an explanatory theory-a theory IX x PREFACE of obvious interest for the empirical investigations of natural language semantics as well as for contemporary philosophy. The details of the theory are contained in the thirteen philosophical and linguistic essays which constitute the post-Introduction chapters herein. The Introduction fully summarizes Chapters 1 through 13. Section 1 of the Introduction gives a first brief statement of what I achieve in the whole book and how I approached the topics. Section 2 offers a higher level of detail and it is the main substantive summary of the book! Section 3, concluding the Introduction, adds more details in order to complete the survey of the 13 chapters. Sections 2 and 3 together provide a rather complete synopsis of the whole book. The Chapters 1 through 13 form a continuous line of thought presented in the order in which I developed it. An important way the continuity shows is in the titles of the parts in which the chapters are grouped. Part I concerns facts and propositions (i.e., the fact-proposition distinction via some contemporary philosophical motivations). Part II is about events and how they are distinguished (especially linguistically) from facts and propositions. Part III moves on to complex events and includes answers to some rather complicated objections (raised in Chapters 5 and 6 of Part II). Part IV concerns the much discussed examples of complex events that are human actions (especially a vis vis uses of "cause"). Part V concludes the book with some initial applications of the whole theory to very topical issues about causation statements and laws (for which preliminaries occurred in Chapters 5, 8, and 10). I am grateful to many people who have informed, inspired, criticized, aggravated, and stimulated me to produce what is new and useful in this book. From teachers long ago like Romane Clark, N. L. Wilson, Charles Baylis, Noam Chomsky, and Jerrold Katz, through friends like Robert Carnes, Kashi Wali, Cindy Stern, John Biro, William Reid and Robert Grimm, to challenging colleagues like William Alston and Jonathan Bennett, I have had some of the best minds helping me. However, there is one philosopher who has been unqualifiedly essential for my writing the chapters in this book-Zeno Vendler. Although a cordial acquaintance, Vendler has not been a close friend. Nor one of my formal teachers. Nor a colleague. I have profited from him solely through his writings. Without his PREFACE xi Linguistics in Philosophy and Res Cogitans, this book could not have been written. I am also grateful to Syracuse University. Late Chancellor Melvin Eggers, past Vice Chancellor John Prucha, and present Vice Chancellor Gershon Vincow, in the face of unrelenting inflation and shrinking incomes from government and other sources, have managed to provide prudent and timely research support for Syracuse University professors. In my case, it has come in the form of leaves for research and writing and finances for regional-to-international travel to conferences and meetings. I would also like to thank the former Chair of Philosophy, Theodore C. Denise, for his early encouragement and support for pursuing philosophy of language via incorporation of methods and results from recent linguistics. I mentioned Kashi Wali as a helpful friend above. But Dr. Wali has been much more than that. Jointly pursuing with her the research reported in Chapter 4 produced an essential part of what I present herein. Further, she forced me with her discussions, criticisms, and innovations, to conclude that all of this material did add up to one coherent and useful theory. Her ideas and encouragement have been vital, and I hope they will continue. I am grateful for permission to reprint portions of my articles to Academic Press for my chapter in Volume 11 of Syntax and Semantics (Chapter 3 herein), to the Chicago Linguistic Society for my contribution in CLS 21, Part 2 (Chapter 11), and to the journals Social Research (Chapter 2), Linguistic Analysis (Chapter 4), Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (Chapter 8), The Monist (Chapter 12), and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Chapter 13). Syracuse, New York June 1996 Part I On Facts and Propositions