Omissions are puzzling, and theyraise myriad questions for many areas of philosophy. In contrast, omissions ofomissions are not usually taken to be very puzzling since they are oftenthought to just be a fancy way of describing ordinary “positive” events, statesof affairs, or actions. This paper contends that – as far as agency isconcerned – at least some omissions of omissions are omissions, not actions. First,this paper highlights how our actions are accompanied by many first-orderomissions - i.e., omissions to act – (...) and that there already are many strongreasons to think that at least some of these first-order omissions are agentiallydistinct from simultaneous actions and from other first-order omissions. Itthen argues that our actions and first-order omissions are also accompanied byhigher-order omissions – i.e., omissions to omit to act – and that higher-orderomissions are distinct from actions and first-order omissions for similarreasons. Higher-order omissions also illuminate a more holistic picture of agency,which involves recognizing that our exercises of agency at a moment in timeinclude all of our overlapping behaviors – our actions, first-order omissions,and higher-order omissions. This paper concludes by exploring the impacts ofhigher-order omissions. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an empirical analysis of attitudes towards the law, which inspires a philosophical re-examination of the moral status of the rule of law. The chapter analyses survey data from the US about law-related attitudes and legal compliance. Consistently with prior studies, it finds that people’s ascriptions of legitimacy to the legal system are predicted strongly by their perceptions of the procedural justice and lawfulness of police and court officials’ action. Two factors emerge as significant predictors of people’s (...) compliance with the law: (i) their belief that they have a (content-independent, moral) duty to obey the law (which is one element of legitimacy, as defined in the chapter); and (ii) their moral assessment of the content of specific legal requirements (referred to in the chapter as ‘perceived moral content of laws’). The chapter also observes an interactive relationship between these two factors. The authors then identify a parallel (similarly interactive) modality in the way that form and content mutually affect the value of the rule of law. They argue that Lon Fuller’s precepts of legality possess an expressive moral quality, but that the extent to which their expressive effect materialises is sensitive to the moral quality of the law’s content. (shrink)

Your belief that Obama is a Democrat would not be the belief that it is if it did not represent Obama, nor would the pain in your ankle be the state that it is if, say, it felt like an itch. Accordingly, it is tempting to hold that phenomenal and representational properties are essential to the mental states that have them. But, as several theorists have forcefully argued (including Kripke (1980) and Burge (1979, 1982)) this attractive idea is seemingly in (...) tension with another equally attractive thesis, namely, the token-identity thesis; the thesis according to which every mental state token is identical with some or other token physical state. In this paper, we show that these seemingly incontrovertible essentialist intuitions are in fact compatible with “token physicalism” regarding the mental. Given a suitably plentitudinous ontology of objects, we argue that there are physical things with which our token mental states can be identified. This is preferable to existing views that give up the essentiality claims or simply reject the token-identity thesis. (shrink)

A central tenet of truthmaker theory is that necessitation is necessary for truthmaking (NEC). This paper defends NEC in a novel, piecemeal way, namely by responding to a potential counterexample involving a changing past. If Carter won a race at t1 but is later disqualified at t2, then Carter no longer won at t1. A wholly past event seems to have changed in the future. The event makes ‘Carter won the race at t1’ (RACE) true between t1‐2 but fails to (...) make it true at t2. So, we have a potential counterexample to necessitation: a truthmaker of RACE fails in another context to make the same truthbearer RACE true. I argue that the best solution to this challenge is not that there are different truthbearers at t1‐2 and t2 (the semantic response), or that RACE was never true because of the future disqualification or will always be true despite the future disqualification. The best solution is to accept that the past can change: past events can change based on what happens in the future (e.g., via their effects). This paper's novel defence of necessitation will illustrate the importance of utilising explicitly ontological and commonsensical tools in accounting for truth. (shrink)

Any account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of (...) faculty psychology is the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main interpretative task in this paper is to clarify how Scotus and Ockham explain moral intentional action in terms of the role and involvement of these kinds of acts respectively. I argue that Scotus’s account is close to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ accounts, whereas Ockham’s account is incompatible with them. (shrink)

Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that concomitant ignorance excuses, and I debunk the view that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility.

I am a friend of supervaluationism. A statement lacks a definite truth value if, and only if, it comes out true on some admissible ways of precisifying the semantics of the relevant vocabulary and false on others. In this paper, I focus on the special case of identity statements. I take it that such statements, too, may occasionally suffer a truth-value gap, including philosophically significant instances. Yet there is a potentially devastating objection that can be raised against the supervaluationist treatment (...) of such cases—in fact two objections. Luckily, both can be resisted. But seeing how requires that we take a closer look at the ontological presuppositions of supervaluationism, allowing for more leeway than is usually supposed. (shrink)

While philosophers of mind have devoted abundant time and attention to questions of content and consciousness, philosophical questions about the nature and scope of mental action have been relatively neglected. Galen Strawson’s account of mental action, arguably the most well-known extant account, holds that cognitive mental action consists in triggering the delivery of content to one’s field of consciousness. However, Strawson fails to recognize several distinct types of mental action that might not reduce to triggering content delivery. In this paper, (...) we argue that meditation provides a useful model for understanding a wider range of types of mental action than heretofore recognized. Conclusions yielded by two distinct bodies of current psychological research on meditation and cognition, and meditation and introspection, buttress meditation’s suitability for this role. (shrink)

The problem of act individuation is a debate about the identity conditions of human acts. The fundamental question about act individuation is: how do we distinguish between actions? Three views of act individuation have dominated the literature. First, Donald Davidson and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that a number of different descriptions refer to a single act. Second, Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim have argued that each description designates a distinct act. Finally, Irving Thalberg and Judith Jarvis Thomson have averred that (...) some acts are sequences of causally related events, which include both a primitive bodily action and some of its effects. All of these accounts have assumed that a simple invariantist account of act individuation captures how ordinary people distinguish between acts. For my dissertation, I devised an experiment to test the action theorists' assumptions. My data show that people's intuitions seem to depend on the valence of the consequences of the action under consideration. So, an invariantist account is not possible. In light of the empirical results, I argue that if we seek a folk account of act individuation, then that account should be able to explain the variability that seems to be present in people's intuitions about different cases. (shrink)

This paper assesses the viability of the model of ”collective action’ for the understanding of the doctrine of the inseparability of trinitarian operations, broadly conceived within a Social-Trinitarian framework. I argue that a ”loose’ understanding of this inseparability as ”unity of intention’ is insufficiently monotheistic and that it can be ”tightened’ by an understanding of the ontology of triune operations analogically modelled after collective actions of a ”constitutive’ kind. I also show that attention to the ”description relativity of action ascriptions’ (...) can potentially move us beyond the impasse of the doctrine of appropriation. Finally, I respond to potential objections. (shrink)

Does doing good in itself make one a better person? This idea is intuitive yet its precise formulation underexplored. This article first shows that it is not the case that a person is good to the extent that her existence brings about good or to the extent that her actions do good. A proportional principle that evaluates a person according to the expected goodness of her actual course of action relative to the expected goodness of other available courses is shown (...) to be the most plausible candidate. However, such a principle can only be a pro tanto principle of what makes persons good. To account for other relevant intuitions – such as that a person's motives matter for how good she is – we need further principles. This article ends with a few practical implications about how to be a better person according to the principle defended here. (shrink)

ABSTRACTProponents of the linguistic analogy suggest that methodologies originally developed for investigating linguistic grammar can also be fruitfully applied to the empirical study of moral grammar: the causal and intentional representations of moral events which – according to the linguistic analogy – drive moral judgements. In the current study, we put this claim to the empirical test. Participants were presented with moral dilemmas which previously have been shown to implement a central principle in moral judgements: the principle of double effect. (...) Participants responded to by and in order to probes to assess causal and intentional representations of this principle. Results show that these linguistic probes do not relate to moral judgement in the manner predicted by proponents of the linguistic analogy and moral grammar. Although the linguistic analogy is a theoretically rich framework, the procedures posited to give it empirical traction require revision. (shrink)

As cause we often specify an event the occurrence of which first guaranteed that of the effect. This notion is explicated in a framework of branching worlds in Sections I to V. VI and VII point out its close relations to the concept of an agent's bringing about an event. The topic of the last two sections is the distinction between causes and necessary circumstances. For this purpose conditionals are used, interpreted with respect to branching worlds without a similarity relation (...) between them. (shrink)

Two questions have been discussed within the context of the action individuation debate. First, the question of action individuation proper - how many actions have been performed when one kills someone by shooting, for example. Second, the question of action externalization - what are the spatial and temporal boundaries of the killing and of the shooting. The internalists (Davidson, Hornsby) argue that the boundaries of actions do not reach beyond the skin of the individual. The externalists (e.g. Ginet) argue that (...) the boundaries of actions do extend beyond the individual. The main problem for the externalists is to explain why so conceived actions are actions. In the paper I evaluate Ginet’s response to this question but find it ultimately unsatisfactory. (shrink)

Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuation to experimentation. The data indicate that people distinguish between actions differently depending upon the moral valence of the outcomes. Thus, the assumption that a single account of act individuation applies (...) invariantly seems mistaken. (shrink)

Introduction : action, thought, pragmatism -- Neo-pragmatism and its critics -- Methodology : reconstructive dialectics -- A history of action theory -- Defining actions -- The explanation of action -- A material explication of agency -- Agency and existence.

The paper has two main objectives: first, it presents a new argument against the so-called Anscombe Thesis (if χ φ-s by ψ-ing, then χ's φ-ing = χ's ψ-ing). Second, it develops a proposal about the syntax and semantics of the 'by'-locution.

A critical survey of the main philosophical theories about events and event talk, organized in three main sections: (i) Events and Other Categories (Events vs. Objects; Events vs. Facts; Events vs. Properties; Events vs. Times); (ii) Types of Events (Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States; Static and Dynamic Events; Actions and Bodily Movements; Mental and Physical Events; Negative Events); (iii) Existence, Identity, and Indeterminacy.

Events are center stage in several fields of psychological research. There is a long tradition in the study of event perception, event recognition, event memory, event conceptualization and segmentation. There are studies devoted to the description of events in language and to their representation in the brain. There are also metapsychological studies aimed at assessing the nature of mental events or the grounding of intentional action. Outside psychology, the notion of an event plays a prominent role in various areas of (...) philosophy as well as in such diverse disciplines as linguistics, probability theory, artifical intelligence, physics, and�of course� history. This plethora of concerns and applications is indicative of the prima facie centrality of the notion of an event in our conceptual scheme, but it also gives rise to some important methodological questions. Can we identify a core notion that is preserved across disciplines? Does this notion, or some such notion, correspond to the pre-theoretical conception countenanced by common sense? Does it correspond to a genuine metaphysical category? (shrink)

Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious (...) ontological commitment. (shrink)

A critical review of the main themes arising out of recent literature on the semantics of ordinary event talk. The material is organized in four sections: (i) the nature of events, with emphasis on the opposition between events as particulars and events as universals; (ii) identity and indeterminacy, with emphasis on the unifier/multiplier controversy; (iii) events and logical form, with emphasis on Davidson’s treatment of the form of action sentences; (iv) linguistic applications, with emphasis on issues concerning aspectual phenomena, the (...) telicity/atelicity distinction, the treatment of statives, and temporal quantification. (shrink)

Every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, or so we may suppose, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments. But how do we count crimes? In particular, how does our notion of a criminal action depend on whether the prohibited action is an activity, an accomplishment, an achievement, or a state?

This paper takes the first steps in the construction of a theory of event identity as that theory applies to historical sentences. The theory is extensional throughout. Following statements of criteria of adequacy for the construction, Davidson's method of regimenting sentences is adopted in order to allow for variables ranging over events. Events in this theory are only partially construed, that is, to the extent of treating them as concrete individuals rather than as classes or repeatable universals. The paper concludes (...) with a statement of several theorems and definitions and an example of how the theory works. (shrink)

In previous work I have argued that talk about negative events should not be taken at face value: typically, what we are inclined to think of as a negative event (John’s failure to go jogging) is just an ordinary, positive event (his going to the movie instead); it is a positive event under a negative description. Here I consider more closely the difficulties that arise in those cases where no positive event seems available to do the job, as with putative (...) cases of causation by omission. In particular, I elaborate on Helen Beebee’s idea that not all causal explanations are reports of causation. When we mention John’s failure to turn off the gas as an explanans of why there was an explosion, we do not say what caused the explosion. We do not mention any of the relevant causes. We just remark that one sort of event that was supposed to occur, and whose occurrence would have prevented the explosion, did not in fact occur. (shrink)

The Principle of Double Effect has served as a guide for both statesmen and soldiers since the middle ages in determining which acts in war are morally permissible and which are not. It is used, in particular, by those who make their moral decisions on the basis of certain moral rules that concern the moral consequences of action. This Principle of Double Effect (hereafter referred to as PDE) comes into play in situations where an agent has the option of performing (...) an act with both good and bad consequences. Advocates of PDE believe that it is morally significant whether a bad consequence is intended by the agent or merely forseen as incidental to an act that is in all other respects morally acceptable.^ Of great interest to moral philosophers discussing acts of war is how this principle applies to the deaths of persons not directly involved in the prosecution of the war. Proponents of the PDE claim that while it is morally impermissible to intentionally bring about the deaths of innocent people during combat, either as a means to a military objective or as a goal in itself, it is permissible under certain circumstances for an agent to choose a course of action which may bring about the deaths of innocent people as a forseeable consequence. (shrink)

The concept of concrete and abstract entities relates to an ontological specification problem, described by Plato’s Sophist concept of the Gods and Giants and their interpretation of metaphysical reality. Developing an ontology without considering the full metaphysical implications leaves conceptual gaps in the creation of events, change in states and management of thoughts, plans and deceptions. This paper seeks to resolve conceptual gaps in the field of cyberspace representation, enabling both ontological interoperability and the development of more complex artificial intelligence (...) technologies. The beginnings of a new meta-ontology for cyberspace are proposed, based on Stoic metaphysics. A meta-ontology provides high-level construction of meaning, upon which more specific ontologies can be built. Coherence between ontologies is important because cyberspace is a contextually dependent knowledge space within the broader infosphere, with many interdependent concepts. This paper enhances the potential for ontological interoperability and transparency between users, human or machine. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

I argue that believing at will – i.e. believing for practical reasons – is in some sense possible and in some sense impossible. It is impossible insofar as we think of belief formation as a re-sult of our exercise of certain capacities (perception, memory, agency). But insofar as we think of belief formation as an action that might lead to such a result (i.e. a deliberation or an in-quiry), believing at will is possible. First I present and clarify the problem (...) and its philosophical relevance (section 1). I then argue that a belief formation as an immediate reaction to practical reasons is not necessarily equivalent to believing at will because the causal mechanism that leads to the formation might be deviant (section 2). Finally, I explain the difference between the two above mentioned meanings of “belief formation” in order to clarify the possibility and impossibility of believing at will (section 3). (shrink)

The doctrine of double effect is a moral principle that distinguishes between harm we cause as a means to an end and harm that we cause as a side-effect. As a purely descriptive matter, the DDE is well established that it describes a consistent feature of human moral judgment. There are, however, several rival theories of its psychological cause. I review these theories and consider their advantages and disadvantages. Critically, most extant psychological theories of the DDE regard it as an (...) accidental byproduct of cognitive architecture. This may provide philosophers with some reason to question its normative significance. (shrink)

Some recent defenses of the 'ought' implies 'can' (OIC) principle try to derive that principle from uncontroversial claims about reasons for action. Reasons for action, it's said, are reasons only for 'potential' actions, which are actions that an agent can perform. Given that 'ought' implies 'reasons', it seems we have our proof of OIC. In this paper, I argue that this latest strategy for defending OIC fails.

A lot of work in metaphysics relies on linguistic analysis and intuitions. Do we want to know what sort of things there are or could be? Then let’s see what sort of things there must be in order for what we truthfully say to be true. Do we want to see whether x is distinct from y? Then let’s see whether there is any statement that is true of x but not of y. And so on. In this paper I (...) argue that this way of proceeding is full of traps and is bound to be pretty useless unless we already have a good idea of what sort of things there are, and of how we are going to count them. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an empirical analysis of attitudes towards the law, which, in turn, inspires a philosophical re-examination of the moral status of the rule of law. In Section 2, we empirically analyse relevant survey data from the US. Although the survey, and the completion of our study, preceded the recent anti-police brutality protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, the relevance of our observations extends to this recent development and its likely reverberations. Consistently with prior studies, we (...) find that people’s ascriptions of legitimacy to the legal system are predicted strongly by their perceptions of the procedural justice and lawfulness of police and court officials’ action. Two factors emerge as significant predictors of people’s compliance with the law: (i) their belief that they have a (content-independent, moral) duty to obey the law (which is one element of legitimacy, as defined here); and (ii) their moral assessment of the content of specific legal requirements (‘perceived moral content of laws’). We also observe an interactive relationship between these two factors. At higher levels of perceived moral content of laws, felt duty to obey is a better predictor of compliance. And, similarly, perceived moral content of laws is a better predictor of compliance at higher levels of felt duty to obey. This suggests that the moral content incorporated in specific laws interacts with the normative force people ascribe to legal authorities by virtue of other qualities, specifically here procedural justice and lawfulness. In Section 3, the focus shifts to a philosophical analysis, whereby we identify a parallel (similarly interactive) modality in the way that form and content mutually affect the value of the rule of law. We advocate a distinctive alternative to two rival approaches in jurisprudential discourse, the first of which claims that Lon Fuller’s eight precepts of legality embody moral qualities not contingent on the law’s content, while the second denies any independent moral value in these eight precepts, viewing them as entirely subservient to the law’s substantive goals. In contrast, on the view put forward here, Fuller’s principles possess (inter alia) an expressive moral quality, but their expressive effect does not materialise in isolation from other, contextual factors. In particular, the extent to which it materialises is partly sensitive to the moral quality of the law’s content. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers are often tempted to make general claims about the importance of certain experimental results for our commonsense notions of intentional agency, moral responsibility, and free will. It is a strong intuition that if the agent does not intentionally control her own behavior, her behavior will not be an expression of agency, she will not be morally responsible for its consequences, and she will not be acting as a free agent. It therefore seems natural that the interest centers (...) on the notion of intentional control. If it can be experimentally shown that agents do as a matter of fact not control their own actions, even though they think they do, it will have far reaching consequences for our moral psychology. In this paper I look at recent eliminative arguments allegedly demonstrating that our commonsense notion of intentional control is incompatible with experimental data in support of the dual visual stream theory. (shrink)

What makes killing morally wrong? And what makes killing morally worse than letting die? Standard answers to these two questions presuppose that killing someone involves shortening that person's life. Yet, as I argue in the first two sections of this article, this presupposition is false: Life-prolonging killings are conceivable. In the last two sections of the article, I explore the significance of the conceivability of such killings for various discussions of the two questions just mentioned. In particular, I show why (...) the conceivability of life-prolonging killings renders Frances M. Kamm's attempt to provide an answer to the second question problematic. (shrink)

I argue against the view that an agent’s knowledge of her own current action cannot in any way rely on perception for its justification. Instead, I argue that when it comes to an agent’s knowledge of her own object-oriented intentional action, the agent’s belief about what she is doing is partly justified by her perception of the object of action. I proceed by first proposing an account of such actions according to which the agent’s knowledge is partly justified by her (...) perception. I then discuss several of objections to my proposal. The most important objection is that I have only managed to show that perception plays an enabling role and not a justificatory role for the agent’s knowledge of her own intentional action. (shrink)

The semantics of our event talk is a complex affair. What is it that we are talking about when we speak of Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar? Exactly where and when did it take place? Was it the same event as the killing of Caesar? Some take questions such as these to be metaphysical questions. I think they are questions of semantics—questions about the way we talk and about what we mean. And I think that this conflict between metaphysic and semantic (...) concerns is indicative of a “deep indeterminacy” (Bennett’s phrase) in our event concept. We do talk about events; but what events a statement is about is not something that can be inferred from the event names we use; it depends heavily (more heavily than with ordinary material objects) on local context and unprincipled intuitions. This paper illustrates this view in connection with two examples: the phenomenon of vagueness and the dispute over identity statements. (shrink)

This article addresses a classic issue in the Metaphysics of Events concerning the conditions under which a specific event remains unchanged amid possible counterfactual changes. Multiplicators, who admit little or no variation in property categories for event individuation, contrast with unifiers, who are more tolerant of such variations. Two fundamental arguments are critically analyzed. Firstly, arguments based on common linguistic practices suggesting that we speak about the same events varying over time are discussed. Counterexamples demonstrate the unreliability of these practices (...) from the standpoint of the metaphysics of event individuation. Secondly, the argument that the non-fragilist position conflicts with the principle of alternative possibilities and the intuition that cases with very close action alternatives do not involve moral responsibility is addressed. The analysis indicates that such cases may involve numerically distinct actions, suggesting the need for a modification in the principle of alternative possibilities. It is concluded that there are no plausible reasons to reject the fragilist stance, and it is possible to decide abductively in its favor. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an analysis of prospective responsibilities. I begin by surveying recent accounts of prospective responsibilities and positioning my view within that literature. Then I offer a more detailed analysis of a shared component of these accounts, namely the claim that S is prospectively responsible for φ only if S has to ‘see to it that φ'.

As cause we often specify an event the occurrence of which first guaranteed that of the effect. This notion is explicated in a framework of branching worlds in Sections I to V. VI and VII point out its close relations to the concept of an agent's bringing about an event. The topic of the last two sections is the distinction between causes and necessary circumstances. For this purpose conditionals are used, interpreted with respect to branching worlds without a similarity relation (...) between them. (shrink)

Nous appelons «thèse des descriptions multiples» l'opinion qui veut qu'une seule et même action peut etre decrite de plusieurs façons différentes selon que Ton prend en considération ou non les différentes conséquences, plus ou moins lointaines, de cette action. Cette thèse joue chez certains penseurs un rôle essentiel dans la solution du problème de l'individuation des actions. Chez D. Davidson notamment, elle intervient de façon décisive dans la démonstration de sa fameuse thèse que toute action se réduit à des mouvements (...) corporels. Nous entendons montrer, premièrement, que la thèse des descriptions multiples, à supposer même qu'elle soit vraie, ne saurait remplir le rôle que lui assigne Davidson dans le contexte de l'individuation des actions; deuxièmement, que cette thèse est fondée en fait sur l'ignorance de certaines distinctions importantes concernant l'action et le langage de l'action. (shrink)

Among the most well-known accounts of events is Jaegwon Kim’s exemplification theory, which identifies each event with a property exemplification. Two of the most influential rival event theorists have urged rejecting exemplificationism on the basis of the charge that it ultimately conflates events with facts [Lombard : Events: A Metaphysical Study. Routledge & Kegan Paul; Bennett :Events and their Names. Hackett Publishing Company]. In response, I offer a detailed examination of Lombard and Bennett’s arguments that exemplificationism undermines the event/fact distinction. (...) I then develop and defend a modified version of Kim’s account that overcomes this objection, and so constitutes a more plausible exemplification theory of events. (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 'A Theory of Human Action' (1970) Alvin Goldman launched an attack on what has become known as the Anscombe-Davidson Identity Thesis. In brief, this is the thesis that our acts are our body movements, and that all the different effects of that movement do not entail that different acts have been performed, but only that an identical act has different descriptions. In her response to Goldman, Anscombe (1981) claims that Goldman is arguing at cross-purposes. I will argue that this (...) is partially true, but only because she accepts what I shall call the Symmetry Thesis. This thesis in turn is natural if you accept a third thesis called the Irreducibility Thesis. These three theses form a consistent set that the defenders of the Identity Thesis would accept and its detractors would deny. It follows that the best way to attack the Identity Thesis is to attack the Irreducibility Thesis on which it is based. I believe that this can be done and that Goldman is basically right, but I will not be concerned with a full defense of Goldman's method of individuating actions against its competitors. Rather, I want to show the grounds, some of them extralogical, upon which preference can be made. (shrink)