TY - JOUR
AU - Bacharach, Julian
AB - Abstract A popular claim in recent philosophy of mind and action is that events only exist once they are over. This has been taken to have the consequence that many temporal phenomena cannot be understood ‘from the inside’, as they are unfolding, purely in terms of events. However, as I argue here, the claim that events exist only when over is incoherent. I consider two ways of understanding the claim and the notion of existence it involves: one that ties existence to the logic of quantification, and another that assimilates the existence of an event to that of a continuant. The first of these, I argue, cannot be the right way to understand the target claim, as there are serious logical obstacles to regarding this notion of existence as temporally variable. The second, on the other hand, leaves it ultimately mysterious what the existence of an event could amount to. I close with the suggestion that the undeniable temporal asymmetries which parties to the debate are interested in are properly understood in perspectival, not ontological, terms. The question of the title is not like the questions whether miracles or dinosaurs are things of the past. It is not the question whether there used to be events, which are now all gone. Rather the question is whether there is some kind of intrinsic connection between events and pastness. That there is some such connection has been asserted recently by a number of philosophers, especially within the philosophy of action. For instance, John McDowell writes, Reality comes to contain, as it were, a particular action of the type describable as ‘my crossing the street’ only when it gets to be true to say ‘I have crossed the street.’ (McDowell 2011, p. 7) Anton Ford writes, As long as someone is closing a door … there is, as yet, no event of the door’s closing. (Ford 2014, p. 33) Similarly, according to Eric Marcus, If no one has crossed Columbus Avenue, there is not yet a crossing of Columbus Avenue, i.e. the answer to the question ‘how many times has Columbus Avenue been crossed?’ is ‘none’. (Marcus 2012, p. 217) Jennifer Hornsby, meanwhile, writes, When a stretch of ongoing activity is over, an event is on the scene. (Hornsby 2013, p. 9) And as Michael Thompson—in a more formal idiom—has it, ‘I am doing A’ is no more or less ‘general’ than ‘I intend to do A’ is; the transition to a genuine particular comes with ‘I did A’. (Thompson 2008, p. 137) For the purposes of this paper, I will take all of the above to express, or involve, a commitment to the following claim: (E) If an event e exists at a time t, then e is over at t; that is, e has occurred, but is no longer occurring, at t.1 This is, in effect, the claim that events are things of the past. For it says that whenever an event exists, that event, having already occurred, must be located wholly in the past. (E), if correct, threatens radical consequences for the philosophy of mind and action. It suggests that the category of event is of no use when it comes to understanding phenomena that involve the experience of ongoing change. Rowland Stout, for instance, in a recent introduction to a collection, writes, “the standard philosophical accounts that treat actions and experiences as events and states lose, or at any rate misread, the subjective aspect of these phenomena, something that can only be captured by thinking of these phenomena from inside the course of their happening” (Stout 2018, p. 3). Consequently, philosophers who endorse (E) often also propose enriching our temporal ontology with an additional category, that of process.2 Rather than assess the prospects for processes, this paper will focus only on events. I shall argue that (E) is incoherent. The basic form of the objection is very simple: events, if they are anything at all, must be things that occur. But, according to (E), events exist only once they have stopped occurring; events never exist and occur at the same time. And this makes it obscure how events could occur at all.3 This complaint is flat-footed, yet it cannot be satisfactorily answered. The paper will develop this line of thought, and draw out the consequences it has for the place of events in a naïve metaphysics of the temporal world. In §1, I outline a background conception of events as concrete particulars, which will guide the subsequent discussion. In §2, I explain the wider dialectical context surrounding (E), specifically its relation to the further claim that events are unavailable to thought and experience while they are occurring. §3 and §4 evaluate (E) in the context of an orthodox, Quinean understanding of existence in terms of the logic of quantification. I argue that this cannot be the right way to understand it, since the quantificational conception is not one that admits of temporal modification. Having set aside the quantificational conception of existence, in §5 I outline a more substantial, quasi-Aristotelian notion of existence that is plausibly involved in our thinking about perishable substances. I then consider, in §6, whether such a notion of existence might be applicable to events in a way that supports (E). I argue that it cannot, for the reason that something’s substantially existing only as past is inconsistent with a basic feature of our thinking about the past: that whatever is now past was once actually present. In §7, I consider a deflationary response to this challenge: I argue that this response, whilst perhaps a coherent position, is not adequate to capture the intuitive idea that events are particulars. Since the deflationary view represents a genuine alternative to the conception of events outlined in §1 and assumed in the rest of the paper, seeing what is wrong with the deflationary view also helps to motivate that conception. I close with some remarks about what, according to the background conception presupposed here, is the correct way to think about events’ existence in time. 1. Events as concrete particulars The basic idea that I take to animate an ontology of events is, to paraphrase Donald Davidson: not only do things happen, but there are particular happenings; agents do things, and moreover there are agents’ particular doings (Davidson 1970a, p. 181). Notwithstanding other equally legitimate uses, for instance, in probability theory textbooks, I will use the term ‘event’ to cover the most general category of particular, unrepeatable happenings or doings—arm-raisings, glass-breakings, elections, earthquakes, sayings, and so on. The recognition of particular events, in addition to the general phenomenon of change, is not a recherché piece of metaphysics, motivated on refined theoretical grounds. Rather, it is an aspect of our ordinary thinking about the temporal world. Such thinking is not limited to tracking the flow of things in change and at rest: we understand our lives as punctuated by and articulated into distinct and distinguishable episodes, each with its own particular weight and significance. This dimension of particularity is especially salient in everyday, engaged thinking about our personal past: we are often concerned, not just with the general fact that such-and-such a kind of thing happened at least once, but also with the individual episodes in virtue of which those general facts hold. Emotions of regret and pride, blame and gratitude, are organized around the recognition of such particular, unrepeatable episodes as make up the fabric of our finite and bounded lives.4 To say this much is just to indicate, impressionistically, how the category of event—of a bounded temporal particular—is to a large extent one we already operate with before any subtle philosophy is on the scene. This is not, of course, to foreclose the possibility that philosophical reflection may lead us in the final analysis to revise, or abandon altogether, the category of event. My aim here is not to investigate the prospects for such revisions. Rather, it is to adumbrate a naïve and intuitive conception of events, with a view to seeing whether it can tenably be combined with the doctrine that events exist only in the past. Elaborating a little more, the conception I have in mind is one in which events are concrete particulars. While I want to leave this notion deliberately vague, allowing for various divergent views of what exactly being a concrete particular amounts to, I understand it to incorporate at least the following, only somewhat less vague, ideas: Events are not abstract entities of any of various familiar varieties. They are not, for instance, sets, or some other type of mathematical construction (for instance, objects introduced by Fregean contextual definition), or propositions, or states of affairs, or situations, or facts (if the latter are taken to be proposition-like, rather than concrete, entities).5 Events, as particulars, admit of a non-trivial distinction between qualitative and numerical identity. Consequently, there may be events that are entirely similar in their intrinsic structure, but nevertheless numerically distinct.6 Events occupy time in a manner at least roughly analogous to how material objects occupy space. They are not, for instance, related to the times or intervals of time at which they occur by containing those times as constituents, or by being true at those times, or ‘obtaining’ at those times (in the way that states or facts may be said to obtain at times or over intervals of time). Events stand in part–whole relations to other events; and, if an event is a proper part of some larger event, the interval of time it occupies is a proper part of the interval of time occupied by the larger event.7 There is nothing like strict entailment holding between these various ideas, and each of them is capable of being further fleshed out in various ways. Nevertheless, they loosely hang together to characterize the core of an intuitive conception of events as real, empirical entities, out there to be met with in the world as we experience it. We should disentangle this core conception of events as concrete particulars from various doctrines that have been associated with it by its proponents or detractors. For instance, there is the view that events are the primary causal relata, and that causation always involves a relation between two separate events (rather than, say, a single event of an agent causing a change in a patient).8 And there is the idea that events are ‘modally fragile’, necessarily having the same parts, boundaries and intrinsic features as they actually have.9 Neither of these is at all obviously required by the idea of an event as a concrete temporal particular. This core conception also makes the category of event intelligible independently of any particular theoretical purpose to which they might be recruited, and our belief in events accordingly more robust than our faith in the viability of those research programmes. It may be an open question, for instance, whether events are suitable entities to serve as semantic values in the analysis of action sentences;10 or whether they are appropriate terms of psychophysical identity claims in the philosophy of mind.11 On the way of thinking just sketched, the structure of events and their relations is there in the world to be found, before any sophisticated theorizing about language, or the relation between mind and brain, has got off the ground; and it is this structure of events which we discern and respond to in, for instance, seeking to make narrative sense of our lives. 2. Thinking about events The question is whether this background conception is compatible with the doctrine that events exist only in the past. But before evaluating that claim, it is worth making some remarks about the context in which it is typically made. This will bring into focus the dialectical demands on the notion of existence in play. The claim labelled (E), that an event only exists once it is over, is closely related to a different claim: that it is only possible to think about an event once it is over. Indeed, one cannot always be certain which of these claims is intended by the authors quoted at the beginning of this paper. Saying that an event is only ‘on the scene’ once it is over, for instance, could just be meant as a claim about what is available to be thought about at a given time. And the quantificational idiom, ‘There is not yet an event …’ could equally be understood to involve a tacit restriction to the domain of thinkable entities. The idea that events are not available as objects of thought until they are over is certainly in tension with a conception of events as empirical entities which we might encounter in experience—rather than as theoretical artefacts or posits, perhaps on a par with times or locations. For if we experience events at all, we surely experience them in the present, while they are happening. And if one can experience an event while it is going on, it is hard to see what would prevent one from formulating thoughts about the event that one is experiencing.12 One would therefore expect the thesis that events cannot be thought about while they are still occurring to be endorsed along with the thesis that events cannot be experienced while they are occurring—and, indeed, cannot be experienced at all. It is presumably for such reasons that Stout and others think that an account of the temporal world solely in terms of events misses something out, and stands in need of supplementation with the further category of process. What is the dialectical relation between the metaphysical claim (E), which concerns the sheer non-existence of events, and claims about their absence from thought and experience? An obvious suggestion is that the first of these underlies the second, that the reason events are absent from the domain of thinkable entities until they are over is that they are not in the world at all. We find what looks like a version of this line of thought offered by John McDowell. Discussing the thesis that intentions in action relate de re to particular actions,13 he writes, By the time there is a particular action of crossing the street for a thought of crossing the street to be directed at, one has crossed the street, and it is too late for the thought to have the nature of an intention. (McDowell 2011, pp. 7–8) On a fairly natural construal, McDowell looks to be arguing from a metaphysical premiss, (E), to a conclusion about the limits of thought. Call this the argument from non-existence. The argument from non-existence, if sound, would constitute a powerful motivation for scepticism about the completeness of a picture of the temporal world as comprising only events, and hence for introducing the category of process. One may of course have doubts about the purely formal cogency of the argument from non-existence. It is not obvious that we can think only about things which exist—fictional characters and so on are obvious counterexamples—and even less obvious that we cannot think about things which do not yet exist but will exist, for instance, if one is in possession of a uniquely identifying description.14 But I want to allow that there is some appropriately qualified version of the argument on which the transition from non-existence to unthinkability is justified.15 However, it is not entirely clear-cut that the argument from non-existence is really what is on offer, here or elsewhere. For instance, in a subsequent passage, McDowell looks to argue more directly for the impossibility of thinking about ongoing events, in a way that does not obviously turn on any prior metaphysical commitments: [A]t the time-bound perspective at which one might say ‘I am crossing the street’, the logical form of what one is saying cannot await a determination by what is going to happen … So it must be wrong to suppose that [the state expressed by that statement’s] being an intention in action consists in the presence of a de re relation to a particular action. (McDowell 2011, pp. 8–9) We might articulate this new thought as follows. When an event is in progress, nothing available to a thinker at that time determines when its later boundary will be, since the event could be interrupted. If events are individuated by their temporal boundaries, that may be taken to imply that nothing available to a thinker at the time determines which of many possible particular events is in progress, and hence no individual event can be singled out as the one that is occurring. Call this line of reasoning the argument from interruption.16 Perhaps the argument from interruption is closer to the heart of what is driving McDowell and others. If that is right, then perhaps we should indeed understand the various remarks quoted at the beginning of this paper as involving an implicit quantifier restriction to the domain of thinkable, or individuable, entities. On this construal, such remarks do not state an independently motivated metaphysical commitment, one which might feature as a premiss in the argument from non-existence. So perhaps taking this wider dialectical context into account shows (E) and the argument from non-existence to be a red herring. Nevertheless, one may suspect metaphysical intuitions lurking in the background of the argument from interruption. Much of its intuitive force derives from taking the putative indeterminacy in a subject’s awareness of an extended ongoing event to reflect an indeterminacy in what structure is really there in the world to be discerned. This is, in effect, tacitly to assume the metaphysical claim of (E)—that an event does not exist, simpliciter, until it is over—as underpinning the argument. But if we are alive to the possibility that (E) is false, and hence that there really is a certain particular event there all along, such arguments may be less compelling than they appear. Compare vision. When we visually perceive ordinary, voluminous objects, not all of their boundaries are present to us at any one time. Consequently, it is possible for a single visual experience of an object with its back parts carefully cut away to be subjectively indiscernible from an experience of the whole thing intact. We need not, moreover, think of a subject who is deceived by such trick objects as necessarily suffering any perceptual illusion. Even so, we need not infer from the possibility of being mistaken about a perceived object’s actual boundaries that, under normal conditions, a subject may not succeed in perceiving whole ordinary objects, and in singling them out for thought on the basis of vision alone. Rather, what such cases teach us is that what a subject counts as being experientially and cognitively in touch with depends in part on the structure provided by the surrounding environment, and not merely on what is phenomenally available to them in the narrow sense in which two subjectively indiscriminable experiences cannot differ in what they make phenomenally available to the subject.17 Just so, if we accept that the whole event already exists when a subject encounters some earlier portion of it, it is far from clear what would prevent us from seeing the actual kind and identity of the larger event as playing a role in fixing what larger whole the subject is, at that moment, experientially in touch with and capable of thinking about. At any rate, it would need to be made out how any supposed indeterminacy in the experience of an ongoing event differs from any such indeterminacy in the visual perception of a three-dimensional object’s near surfaces. I am not proposing any substantial analogy between the two cases, experiencing a voluminous object and experiencing an extended event. There are doubtless many important differences between how thought and awareness of wholes is related to, or mediated by, awareness of parts in each case. The point is rather the dialectical one, that the argument from interruption, shorn of the metaphysical support of (E), seems to rest on an assumption that what a subject’s experience makes available for them to think about cannot ever exceed what it makes available in subjectively indiscriminable ‘bad’ cases; and that, in the case of material objects and their parts, that assumption does not seem compelling. The claim that ongoing events cannot be singled out for thought may thus be seen to draw some of its appeal from an oscillation between thinking of the claim as motivated on independent metaphysical grounds—there is just not yet enough stuff in the world to be thought about—and thinking of it as motivated by considerations which properly concern only the limited individuatory powers of a finite subject at a single point in time. The oscillation consists in allowing a background metaphysical picture to bolster the intuitions that make the argument from interruption seem compelling, while at the same time disavowing the need to make that background picture coherent. This is not to say there are no other routes to the claim that occurring events cannot be thought about, or the more restricted claim that intentions in action do not relate de re to particular actions. Whether that is so remains to be seen. But the central question that emerges from this section is whether the background picture—that summarized by the claim (E)—can be made coherent in a way that supports the argument from non-existence. I will argue that it cannot. 3. Existence and quantification An influential way of understanding claims of existence, due primarily to Quine, is in terms of the first-order existential quantifier. Following Russell (1940), Quine argued that incoherence results when ‘exists’ is construed as a predicate of individuals, ascribing some property that an entity may possess or lack. Ontological commitment is revealed instead in the logic of generality: “this is, essentially, the only way we can can involve ourselves in ontological commitments: by our use of bound variables … To be is, purely and simply, to be the value of a variable” (Quine 1948, pp. 31–2, emphasis in original). On this conception, the quantificational form ‘there are Fs’ has priority over the predicational form ‘a exists’.18 The Quinean conception of existence would seem to secure the connotation that only existent entities can be thought about. Setting aside complications concerning fictional characters and so on, it is a mark of singular thoughts and experiences—that is, thoughts and experiences which relate subjects to particulars—that they can appropriately be described in such a way such that existential generalization on the object of the singular thought preserves truth. For instance, if I am thinking a singular thought about a particular book, then there is a particular book about which I am thinking. To put this another way: in order for a subject to enjoy thoughts and experiences of a particular, there must be such an item as the object of their thought and experience. If there were no such item, then there would be nothing for them to be thinking about or experiencing.19 This conception also dovetails nicely with what has been an influential motivation for an ontology of events, namely the semantics of verbal sentences. Davidson (1967a) argued that these sentences are to be analysed as involving an existential quantifier ranging over events. A key observation of Davidson’s is that a sentence such as Guthrie fell over asserts that Guthrie fell over at least once, but not how many times he fell over. However, it is subject to adverbial count-modification, providing this absent information, for instance, Guthrie fell over three times. These facts, among others, suggest that we should think of sentences like (1) and (2) as a kind of existential quantification—quantification over events. Hence (1) is analysed as ∃e( Fell over (Guthrie, e)) ⁠, that is, that there was an event of Guthrie’s falling over; and similarly, (2) is analysed as the statement that there were (at least) three events of Guthrie’s falling over. It is notable that this analysis is most readily applicable to past-tensed sentences. Specifically, the main present-tensed counterpart of the verbal phrase fall over is the progressive aspect: Guthrie is falling over.20 This, however, is not susceptible to the same count-modification: Guthrie is falling over three times.21 This difference between perfective and imperfective aspect is suggestively analogous to that between count- and mass-quantification. This has led some to suggest that the progressive aspect does not quantify over events, but rather over stuff-like processes.22 Moreover, the progressive exhibits the so-called ‘imperfective paradox’: statement (4) is not proven false if Guthrie does not in fact fall over (being propped up at the last minute by a helpful companion.) Thus it seems that the truth of (4), unlike that of (1), is independent of the actual existence of any event of Guthrie’s falling over. These brief considerations suggest that the past tense, but not the present, is appropriately understood as directly quantifying over events; and this may be thought to provide some support for (E).23 If we understand existence along Quinean lines, then the thought is simply this: past-tensed perfective verb forms, but not the present tense, involve quantification over events. Since existential commitment is revealed only by quantification, we should thus only recognize the existence of those events which are reported by the past perfective. It thus seems to follow, as per the argument attributed to McDowell, that there is no thinking about an event until it is over. But this line of thought is not conclusive. In particular, it is questionable whether (E) can be fully understood just in terms of the quantificational structure of verbal statements. The following section will expand on this point. 4. General and singular existence The Quinean analysis of existence applies in the first instance to general existence claims. Indeed, the Russell-Quine view is motivated at least in part by a desire to avoid difficulties associated with singular existentials. But it is not clear that, in the present context, questions of singular existence can be fully circumvented. To see this, consider a general principle about existential claims: that, if true, they have true singular witnesses. Thus: ∃-Witness. For any true statement24 of the form ⌜∃xϕ(x)⌝ ⁠, there is at least one true statement of the form ⌜ϕ(a)⌝ ⁠, where ‘a’ is schematic for a term denoting some individual. As applied to the event-existential analysis of action sentences, this means that a statement such as (1) above requires for its truth a singular witness, a true statement of the form: (6) ⌜e is an event of Guthrie’s falling over ⌝ or, more generally, (7) ⌜e is a ϕ-event ⌝ ⁠, where ‘e’ is, again, not a variable but a schematic term going proxy for a name for an event. The commitment to singular witnesses for action sentences, as a consequence of the proposal that such sentences quantify over events, is perhaps easy to miss if we attend only to the surface structure of the language of change, since genuine names for events in natural languages are few and far between—with notable exceptions for especially momentous events, as in ‘Watergate’ or ‘The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event’—and hence statements with the form of (7) are rarely actually asserted. But if we look at the wider context of our thought and experience of the temporal world, there is nothing revisionary or surprising about it. For, on the picture sketched in §1, the notion of a temporal particular is one that does indeed play a role in our manifest image of the temporal world, and our thinking about our lives extends to the particular episodes they comprise. Now, as noted, (E) is not just the general claim that every existing event is located in the past, like the corresponding claims about dinosaurs and miracles. Rather, it makes a claim about when each individual event comes into existence, namely at the point of completion. And understanding this claim requires us to descend to the level of the singular witnesses of existential claims. We need to make sense of the claim, of an arbitrary event, that while it was occurring it did not exist. Moreover, the need to make sense of such claims of singular non-existence is required by the dialectical context of the argument from non-existence. The alleged problem for singular thought about ongoing actions is not that while the action is ongoing, there are no events, or not enough events, of the relevant kind—the former is generally speaking false, and why should the latter be relevant? Rather, it is that the very event which is the sole candidate target of a de re intention, the one which is currently underway, is not yet complete and hence does not exist. Such arguments thereby require us to trace individual events back to that liminal phase of their careers before, as (E) has it, they emerged into reality as full-blown particulars.25 We are, then, already mixed up in the shady business of singular non-existence claims. This is not yet an objection. The disreputability of singular non-existence claims may not be deserved; indeed the next section will suggest a way of making sense of them, at least in temporal contexts. The present problem is that specifically the Quinean conception cannot be reconciled with the demands made of it by the argument from non-existence. Singular (non)-existence claims require us to understand ‘exists’ as applying to individuals; on the Quinean conception, it is a quantifier or second-level predicate. We can, however, generate a first-level predicate expressing Quinean existence by using the identity predicate: the open sentence (8) ∃y(x=y) says that x is identical with something; that is, there is such a thing as x.26 Given classical logic with identity, the resultant property is one which, as a matter of logical necessity, applies always to everything. This notion of singular existence—existing as simply being something—is what Timothy Williamson calls ‘existence in the logical sense’. As he puts it, ‘Non-existence in the logical sense is a very radical matter indeed, for it entails having no properties or relations whatsoever’ (Williamson 2002, p. 246).27 This gives a purely formal vindication of the idea that non-existent entities cannot be thought about—as the contrapositive of the claim that being thought about means being something—and hence promises to validate the argument from non-existence. However, for the argument to be sound, this logical sense of existence must be one which admits of significant temporal modification. It must be that the domain of what there is, absolutely and unrestrictedly, varies over time. But this is hard to make sense of. Consider some temporarily existing object, o. We want to say that once upon a time, o did not exist. This means that, at that time, something, namely o, was nothing. And this would seem to be impossible: it is never the case that something is nothing. A natural response here is to say that past (or future) non-existence is less problematic than present non-existence, since in denying an object o’s existence at a past time, we are presupposing only that o exists now to satisfy the past-tensed predicate ‘did not exist’. But this simply assumes that the purely logical notion of existence, existing as merely being something, is one that admits of significant tensing: that when we say o exists now but not then, we might mean by this o’s existence in the logical sense. And this is precisely the idea whose intelligibility is in question. In order to allow that logical existence might be tensed, we need to make sense not merely of the idea that certain existential claims are now true but were once false. We need, in addition, the temporally de re claim that a certain identifiable individual, o, once failed to be anything at all. And this requires us both, with respect to a past time, to identify an individual, o, as the one we are talking about and nevertheless, with respect to that same past time, to deny that there is anything at all identifiable as that individual. It is tempting to view these difficulties as merely an artefact of the logic of quantification, in particular of the fact that in classical logic, every instance of ⌜a=a⌝ is a theorem, and so, by existential generalization, is every instance of ⌜∃x(a=x)⌝ ⁠. It can seem hard to swallow that, for every instance of a, it is a logical truth that a exists. So maybe we can find the resources for tensing the logical notion of existence in a free logic. This raises questions of what form the free logic is to take, and how it is interpreted. In particular, we should ask whether the name position in a true singular negative existential of the form ⌜¬∃x(a=x)⌝ is understood as denoting a non-existent object. A purely negative free logic can verify such statements simply by assessing all atomic statements containing empty names as false, and treating the truth functions classically.28 The natural interpretation of this is that atomic sentences with empty names are false and their negations true, because they are not about any individual at all. The motivation behind such a negative free logic is, presumably, that we should not have every instance of ⌜a=a⌝ ⁠, because we cannot assume every term we might substitute for a refers. But the present problem is different. Our problem is to be able to say consistently, with respect to a certain time, of a given individual, that it is nothing. Thus we should want to be able to affirm, minimally, the identity of the individual said not to exist at the earlier time with some individual identifiable now: a positive, atomic predication of a non-existent object. In other words, we need o = o, but decline to infer the existential ∃x(o=x) ⁠. This requires us to interpret o—and in general the a in any true ⌜¬∃x(a=x)⌝—not as non-referring, but as referring to a non-existent object. Trying to make sense of what is going on here inevitably ends up betraying the radical nature of logical (non-)existence. For instance, it is tempting to model things in terms of a variable domain of individuals, perhaps expressed as a function from times to the set of individuals that exist at each time (Cocchiarella 1991). But this is in effect to adopt a tenseless way of conceiving the situation, on which the different time-bound domains are understood as variable restrictions of an absolute, invariant domain, their union. And if such a conception is indeed intelligible, this of course shows that there is an unrestricted, tenseless logical notion of existence underlying the tensed one. We must therefore conclude that the tensed notion of existence is not the radical, unrestricted notion of merely being something, but rather a restriction on the absolute notion. The most natural way of interpreting such a restriction is epistemic: at any given time, the domain of individuals comprises just those entities which are thinkable at that time. This epistemic interpretation of a tensed notion of existence is coherent and perhaps plausible; but it cannot serve the role required of it in the present dialectic. What is at stake is whether, as per the argument from non-existence, we have any principled reason for denying that events can be thought about while they are occurring. On the present construal, the claim that events do not exist while they are occurring is now equivalent to just that denial. But some reason needs to be offered for such a claim! If tensed existence is ultimately an epistemic notion, the argument looks flatly premiss-circular. One might, on the other hand, reject all models for making sense of variable existence in terms of restrictions on an overarching super-domain.29 But it is doubtful whether someone who takes this line can seriously and unqualifiedly allow that there is ever something which was once nothing at all. For such a person has no resources for drawing a distinction between its being true, from the perspective of now, that o was nothing then and its having been true, from the perspective of then, that o is nothing. The radical, unrestricted character of the logical sense of existence is exceedingly hard to square with its being subject to any form of variation or modification, temporal or otherwise. Williamson (op. cit.) takes such and related considerations to establish that everything does, indeed, exist necessarily and eternally. If that is correct, then of course (E) is false. Or at any rate, the logical sense of existence cannot be the right way of understanding the claim. But in that case we need to know what the alternative notion of existence is, and why something’s lacking it at a time should prevent subjects grasping any of the many singular truths that hold of it at that time. Perhaps these considerations are not decisive; there may yet be some way of avoiding the formal problems involved in making sense of an absolute, but temporally variable, logical notion of existence.30 But the above discussion indicates that there are serious logico-metaphysical difficulties, of a very general nature, about such an interpretation of the quantifier. It may thus be uncharitable to read proponents of the argument from non-existence as committed to such a notion. Rather, we may see them as aiming to articulate an independent, more substantial notion of event-existence, one with the requisite links to singular thought and experience to validate the argument. This is indeed what we find in philosophers such as McDowell and Thompson, who explain the non-existence of ongoing events by way of an analogy with the coming-to-be of continuants. In the following sections I consider whether the existence of continuant substances is capable of providing a template for what is needed. 5. Substantial existence Many substances are perishable. Living things, for instance, are born and die, and we ought to be able to acknowledge that birth and death are a kind of coming-to-be and passing-away. Yet we are also obliged to admit truths about past living things (Frege was celebrated only after his death), and we quantify over past things that were not simultaneously present (there were thirteen emperors of the Qing dynasty). What this seems to suggest is that, at least for continuants, we should acknowledge a kind of existence that involves more than merely being a possible value of a bound variable, one which also admits of tense. Call this existence in the substantial sense. This substantial sense of existence has connotations of certain ways of behaving and concretely being in the world, perhaps specific to that thing’s kind. In the case of organisms, it is plausible that existence in the substantial sense is intimately connected with being alive, and with the kinds of living activity connected with that thing’s species.31 In the case of continuant substances, it seems plausible to maintain that they are unavailable to thought before they come into substantial existence—before they are born or made—but in principle available thereafter. The conception of existence sketched here affords at least the outline of an explanation of these intuitions. Thinking about an individual requires, at some point, singling it out. More specifically, thinking about an individual requires either singling it out there and then, or being appropriately causally related to a prior act of singling out, for instance through memory, or through competence with a proper name whose use can be traced back to some initial singling out. Now, plausibly, something can only be singled out if it is there—if it is actually concretely present for the singling out to take place.32 This is just to say that entities can only be singled out at a time if they exist in the substantial sense at that time. From this it follows, assuming that causation is unidirectional, that as far as temporal continuant substances are concerned, the only thinkable entities are ones that substantially exist at the present time or prior to the present time.33 Thus for continuant substances we have a notion of substantial existence that can play two key theoretical roles. First, it can explain the sense in which substances come to be and pass away, but without making singular non-existence contradictory. The Quinean quantificational conception of existence can still stand, but we now understand it in terms of substantial existence: in our temporal sophistication, we have a grip on the idea of things substantially existing at times other than the present, and can extend our (classical) quantifiers to include those past and future entities.34 Secondly, substantial existence has an epistemic and temporal significance, since cognitive access to particulars is enabled by acts of singling out. Access to particulars which are not presently (substantially) existent is hence mediated by causal connections to episodes of contact with them at times at which they were. Because thought about particulars is thereby bound up with the workings of causality, it bears causality’s temporal orientation. This introduces a fundamental asymmetry in our access to past and future individuals. The question now is whether this style of explanation might apply to events in a way that would support (E) in the present context. 6. Being an event Building on the previous section’s sketch account of the existence of continuants in time, (E) might be understood as saying: there is some substantial mode of being for events, importantly analogous to the active being of a continuant substance, associated with having occurred. (Perhaps having occurred is a determinable, whose many determinates correspond to different kinds of event.) This makes events analogous with continuants in the following way: the completion of an event is something analogous to the birth or creation of a continuant; the period leading up to the completion of the event is analogous to the process of gestation, assembly, or whatever, which leads up to the creation of a new continuant. Moreover, for events, having occurred places constraints on cognitive access similar to those that, for instance, living places on biological continuants (cf. Thompson 2008, p. 134; McDowell 2011, pp. 8–9). An essential aspect of the picture just sketched for continuants is that we understand the mere logical existence of a continuant in terms of its past or future substantial existence. The substantial sense of ‘exists’ is its focal sense, underlying the thinner, logical one. Napoleon’s logical existence as a subject of predication or possible value of a variable is not a matter of a kind of logical shadow obtruding into the present; rather, it consists in the fact that he once existed as a flesh-and-blood human, although he no longer does. This is connected with a more general point about our concept of the past. In thinking about things past, we have a sense of something somehow actual but nevertheless absent from the world as we now experience it. Central to this conception is our appreciation that the past comprises the same kinds of things, broadly speaking, that we can experience now, and the very same things, strictly speaking, that were once available to be experienced. The primacy, in temporal contexts, of the substantial sense of existence is a consequence of this conception. It is because we can temporally ‘decentre’, and understand the idea of there being, say, a living human being at a time now past that we can understand the idea of a merely past human.35 It is only thanks to our grip on the idea of past presence that we can understand the idea of present pastness. But the idea that having occurred could supply a focal sense of existence for events destroys this conception of the past. It requires that we think of the past as comprising entities of a sui generis kind, categorially different from anything to be encountered in the present. Not only are these entities unencounterable, but we cannot understand what it would be for such a thing to be present to us: their being consists precisely in their absence. If this is what events are, we begin to lose our grip on their reality. The domain of past events becomes a mythical realm, removed from any conception of actuality we can form. The suggested analogy between the progress of an event and the coming-to-be of a substance is in this respect profoundly misguided. When a substance comes into being, we can distinguish process and product: the formation process and the new individual that results. The possibility of the distinction rests on the fact that once a substance is created, it is there to be met with, part of the present fabric of the world; we thereby separate it from the goings-on, now over, that led up to its existence. But attempting to resolve non-substantial changes, such as my crossing the street, into process and product is hopeless. What is the thing produced when, say, I cross the street? Just: the event of my having crossed the street. But if this is distinct from the process by which it came to be—from what was actually going on while I was crossing the street—we are left utterly in the dark about what the event, as so distinguished, might be.36 Denying the existence of ongoing events opens up an ontological rift between the past and the present, and thereby renders their connection unfathomable. If the past comprises its own, proprietary kind of entity, necessarily foreign to the present, we can no longer regard the past and the present as of a piece, the past having once been present and the present soon to be past. We surrender our grip on a unified temporal reality, of which past and present are complementary faces, and are set adrift in time, stuck in an unmoored, free-floating present. 7. Events deflated? The previous section pressed the requirement that our understanding of what it is for something to exist as past must in some way be grounded in an understanding of what it is for such a thing to have once been present. But the defender of (E) may reject this requirement as spurious. They may reply that here the analogy with continuants is misleading: although our understanding of the past existence of continuants is grounded in our understanding of their present existence, this is not how it is with events. How, then, is the idea of an event’s past existence to be elucidated? The answer offered may be: our understanding of the existence of events constitutes no more than what is manifested in our competence with past-tensed aspectual verb forms, specifically with the alternation of imperfective ‘A was ϕ-ing’ and perfective ‘A  ϕ-ed’. Sebastian Rödl writes, [A] thought refers … to a concept with an argument place for events if and only if it predicates … a movement form. We grasp the contrast of event and event-concept through the contrast of movement and movement form, which contrast is grounded in the contrast of aspect. (Rödl 2012, p. 164) The key idea of this passage is that the category of event, or temporally extended occurrence, is to be explained via the contrast of imperfective and perfective aspect that aspectual verb forms (‘movement forms’) admit.37 Accordingly, one might extract from these remarks the suggestion that we can understand the idea of a particular event of, say, my crossing the street existing in the past just in terms of the truth of the pair of statements ‘I was crossing the street’ and ‘I crossed the street’. This response embodies a certain deflationary attitude to the category of event. We understand the past existence of an event in terms of the truth of aspectual past-tensed statements, rather than vice versa. Thus the demand for any further account of what it is for an event to exist in the past is rejected.38 The position staked out by such a response is, I think, at least coherent. The question is whether it really amounts to a full-blooded acceptance of the category of event. The deflationist’s suggestion is that statements about events be understood ultimately in terms of aspectual verb forms predicated of continuants. This recalls A. N. Prior’s insistence that ‘what looks like talk about events is really at bottom talk about things’ (Prior 2003, p. 16). It is hard to see how such an attitude is to be reconciled with a conception of events as concrete particulars. If Rödl is correct to insist that we only grasp the notion of an event through our comprehension of aspectual verbs, then perhaps so much the worse for the conception of events as concrete particulars. But this cannot be the whole story. Davidson’s crucial observation was that ordinary past perfective statements only tell us that a certain kind of event occurred at least once. The missing ‘How-many?’ information can of course be supplied by adverbial modifiers. But any count-modification still produces only statements that have the form of generalizations rather than speaking of particular events. Meanwhile, I have been pressing the requirement of (⁠ ∃-Witness) that any genuine generalization, if true, must have a true singular witness. The question is whether the deflationist is able to provide any coherent account of what such a singular witness might be. It is of course possible to use devices of nominalization to formulate what look like singular witnesses: ‘My crossing of the street began at 4 p.m.’, and so on. With sufficient (explicit or implicit) restrictions in place, such nominalizations may succeed in picking out, by description, particular events. But the question is whether the deflationist can understand nominalizations in this way, as singular witnesses for quantified statements. For the deflationist, nominalizations can always be paraphrased back into modified verbal form—‘I crossed the street exactly once between 4 p.m. and 4.01 p.m.’ But if the nominalized sentences are so paraphrasable, then we would not after all have moved beyond the generality of the ordinary past perfective to the layer of singular truth below. Here is another way of putting the point. On a Russellian analysis, statements containing definite descriptions are existential rather than singular in form. Such statements do not, therefore, constitute the singular witnesses required by ∃-Witness. Rather, their truth implies that such witnesses exist. And if the deflationist’s nominalizations are just paraphrases of modified verbal forms (perhaps involving some contextually determined restriction of the domain), this is effectively to say that their underlying form is existential, like a Russellian descriptive statement. But in that case, the intelligibility of such nominalizations does not show that we have any grip on what a singular witness for a past perfective statement would be. By contrast, someone with a conception of events as concrete particulars might regard verb nominalizations as, at least sometimes, containing a deictic component: a contextually determined reference to a particular event of the relevant kind.39 In fully explaining the meaning of such a statement, one would need to oneself point in thought to the event demonstrated via the nominalization. Such an element of deixis takes us beyond the merely general form of the ordinary verbal statement. Thus someone who adopts this strategy will be exploiting a conception of what it is for an event to exist that goes beyond what can be expressed by means of aspectual verbs, and hence is unavailable to the deflationist. There is perhaps a latent Quineanism in Rödl’s deflationary move. It embodies the idea that commitment to an ontology of events is expressed just in the quantificational, or quasi-quantificational, structure of our linguistically mediated ways of representing change and motion. What I am fundamentally urging is that this attitude does not embody an adequate recognition of events as particulars. Rather, attending to the dimension of particularity in our understanding of time should lead us to acknowledge an area of our thinking which is closely related to, but is not fully explicable in terms of, our ways of representing change in general. 8. Concluding remarks (E) is, in effect, a denial that events have while they are occurring something which they may be said later to enjoy. As I have argued, it is wholly mysterious what that something might be. If we mean merely being a possible subject of predication, then there are serious obstacles to making sense of this being temporally variable in a way that does not degenerate into a merely epistemic restriction. If, on the other hand, we have in mind something more robust, analogous to the existence of a continuant, we then seem to be committed to separating the existence of an event from what was actually going on while it was occurring. The fundamental mistake here is to want a notion of existence at a time for events that works in roughly the same way as that for a continuant. Someone in the grip of this desire, yet impressed by the thought that events, unlike continuants, are in some sense not ‘all there’ at any one time, may well recoil from saying that events exist at any time while they are occurring. It is then tempting to picture the event as gradually accumulating, finally coming into existence at the point of completion, like the last bricks of a house being laid. But this is a fantasy; as I have argued, we are left with no real idea of what the event, as finished product, might be. What the deflationary move just discussed gets right is the recognition that it is a mistake to look for such a notion of existence at a time. But, as I argued, it is equally mistaken to insist that the notion of a particular event cannot take us beyond what is expressible in the language of things changing and having changed. The correct thing to say is, rather, that events occur; and occurrence is something that happens over time. The basic notion is accordingly not that of existence at a time, but occurrence over an interval. We can, if we want, decide to say that an event exists at t just in case it occurs over an interval that contains t—or even, as per (E), that an event exists at t just in case it occurs over an interval prior to t. Alternatively, it may be preferable to reserve the term ‘existence’, when speaking of events, for the bare, tenseless, logical notion, and hence to say that an event exists just in case it occurs over some interval or other. But we must remember that any such notions are artificial, and derivative of the more fundamental one of occurrence over an interval. If we keep in mind that events, fundamentally, occur over intervals of time, many interesting questions arise regarding the temporal conditions of experiencing, singling out, and thinking about particular events. I have urged caution in the assessment of arguments from interruption; but I have by no means ruled out other routes to the conclusion that events cannot be singled out while they occur. A different idea, not explicitly raised by McDowell or others, is that there may be something about standing to a particular action as agent that prevents one from singling it out as a particular while one is so acting. There is, so one might argue, something inherently general about practical thought: it involves thinking about one’s agency—indeed one’s whole life—as an open-ended, developing project of realizing one’s ends and values. In contrast, thinking about one’s particular actions, the actual worldly events in which such ideals are more or less perfectly realized, typifies a mode of thinking about one’s life that is not practical, but rather reflective and evaluative—and, indeed, typically retrospective. Raising this possibility allows us to underline a more general point. There are undoubtedly deep differences in how we relate to events in the past, present and future; and there may be special differences in the case of our own actions. The fundamental mistake involved in a claim such as (E) is to understand such perspectival differences in ontological terms. Doing so makes the past into a disconnected and autonomous realm, and renders our belief in it ultimately mythical. Rather, the complexities of how we relate to the events that make up our lives can only properly be got into view once we have discarded the incoherent idea of a thing of the past.40 Footnotes 1 The assumption here is that the relevant sense of ‘over’ is one on which no event is ever both over and occurring. I leave aside difficulties concerning the last moment of an event. 2 There is not much unity in the way the term ‘process’ is used by its advocates. Some influential, but contrasting, recent pleas for processes include Stout (1997, 2003, 2016), Steward (2012, 2013), Hornsby (2012, 2013), Crowther (2011), and Galton and Mizoguchi (2009). These different proposals are discussed and developed further in the papers collected in Stout (2018). An important early discussion is O’Shaughnessy (1971), although his concerns are somewhat different and he does not obviously insist on a categorial distinction between processes and events. 3 Alec Hinshelwood (2018, ch. 1, §§3.1–3.2] detects a similar incoherence in the claim that events belong to the past. Hinshelwood diagnoses this claim as originating in an attempt to combine a tensed metaphysics of time with a view of events on which they ‘fall under their kinds in virtue of their actual temporal boundaries’, and offers a non-standard view of events which he claims resolves the difficulty (2018, ch. 5). It does seem plausible to me that there are inherent and hard-to-defuse tensions between a tensed metaphysics and the notion of a temporal particular, although these issues lie beyond the scope of this paper. I discuss these in Bacharach (2020, ch. 6). 4 This is a theme explored further in Bacharach (2020, chs. 3–4). 5 For various views that take events to be in some way abstract, see Taylor (1985), Chisholm (1970, 1990), N. L. Wilson (1974), and Barwise and Perry (1983). Kim (1976) talks of events as triples of substances, properties and times, although it is not clear how seriously he intends this as an identification. The idea of introducing events by contextual definition was suggested to me by an anonymous reviewer for this journal. 6 For contrasting views of events as repeatable, see Lewis (1987), Chisholm (1970), and Montague (1969). This also goes with the standard use of the term ‘event’ in probability theory. 7 For a theory of part–whole for events, see Bach (1986). See also the discussion of occurrences in (Simons, 1987, ch. 4.1). 8 These ideas are closely associated with Davidson (e.g. Davidson 1967b); the assumption that irreducible transactions, or ‘causings’, would not be events, seems to operate in, for example, Alvarez and Hyman (1998), Hyman (2015), and Ford (2014). Child (1994, ch. 3) convincingly argues that there is no reason a broadly Davidsonian approach to events and causality cannot countenance such events. 9 This view may be taken to be implied by some remarks in (Davidson et al., 1993, p. 200); and it is tentatively endorsed in Simons (1987). Steward (2012, 2013) associates modal fragility with events, and takes the contrary property of ‘robustness’ to be a characteristic mark of the distinct category of process. 10 For example, Davidson (1967a); followers of the Davidsonian event-semantics programme include Parsons (1990) and Higginbotham (2009). 11 See Davidson (1970b); cogent worries about whether events are suitable relata for such identities are raised by Hornsby (1981) and Steward (1997). 12 This is not necessarily to assume it is always the case that, if one is experiencing some object, one is thereby in a position to think about it. There may be cases where one’s experience of an object is, for instance, not sufficiently rich or determinate to put one in a position to single it out for thought. Or singling out the object may require possessing concepts which one lacks at the time of the experience. It is harder to see, though, how the quite general claim that events are never available to thought until they are over is compatible with their presence in experience. 13 The official target of McDowell’s discussion is George Wilson (1989). The idea may also be found in Baier (1977). 14 Compare Kaplan’s (1968) descriptively introduced name ‘Newman-1’. 15 Note, moreover, that a parallel argument to the conclusion that one cannot experience ongoing events does not appear to be subject to the same counterexamples. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point. 16 Note that, as formulated, the argument appears to depend on the assumption that events are modally fragile. As I noted in §1, this assumption is not obviously well motivated. But this is not the main point on which I want to press the argument. 17 A celebrated discussion of these issues is Clarke (1965); see also Martin (2017). 18 See, however, Moore (1936), Strawson (1967), Geach (1954), and Evans (1982). More recently, Crane (2012, 2013) and Priest (2016) argue against the doctrine that existential commitment is expressed by quantification. 19 For this conception of singular thought, see in particular Evans (1982) and McDowell (1982, 1986); see Martin (2002) for critical discussion. 20 The simple present ‘Guthrie falls over’ is normally—although not universally—given a habitual or generic reading, relating to a general pattern or tendency rather than a specific occurrence. 21 On the other hand, ‘Guthrie is falling over for the third time’ is perfectly acceptable. This suggests that the linguistic data may be more equivocal than they initially appear; but I will not pursue this line of enquiry here. 22 Observation of this analogy is due principally to Mourelatos (1978); see also Bach (1986). 23 Marcus in particular seems to motivate the claim in this way (2012, p. 217). 24 I follow Rumfitt (2010) in using ‘statement’ to mean an interpreted sentence-type with all (truth-conditionally relevant) contextual parameters fixed. As will become apparent, my use of the notion is highly idealized, such that there may be a true statement of the form ⌜ϕ(a)⌝ even if no actual practice exists of using a name which can replace ‘a’ to yield a true sentence. Perhaps this notion of a statement might be glossed as an interpreted possible sentence, although there may be some difficulty in spelling out precisely the kind of possibility involved; alternatively, one may prefer to talk about language-independent propositions. 25 McDowell expresses a recognition that there may be a difficulty here when he writes, ‘things … that do not exist yet are not yet the particulars that, we may awkwardly say, they are going to be’ (2011, p. 8). The following few paragraphs show how the awkwardness in McDowell’s chosen mode of expression becomes a full-blown contradiction as long as we conceive existence in Quinean terms. 26 Alternatively, the idea expressed in Moore (1936) and (Evans, 1982, p. 345) that ‘exists’ expresses a first-level predicate true of everything suggests a partial definition by the axiom ∀xExists(x) ⁠. Thanks to an editor at this journal for flagging this option. 27 Williamson’s line of thought regarding logical existence, which I exploit here, is further developed in Williamson (2013). 28 See, for example, Burge’s (1974) free logic for singular terms. 29 Someone who, like Hornsby (1997), following McDowell (1994), identifies facts with thinkables, is likely to be sympathetic to this thought, and to reject the idea of the domain of thinkable entities as a restriction on what, unrestrictedly, there is. 30 One of the best-developed recent attempt is Correia and Rosenkrantz (2018), chapter 2 of which offers some responses to the arguments of Williamson (2013). 31 This may seem to threaten to make ‘exists’ ambiguous, with two relatively unconnected senses. But they need not be unconnected: for temporal things that enjoy substantial existence, to exist in the logical sense can be identified with existing in the substantial sense at some time or other. A treatment of tensed existence along these lines is given by Woods (1976); see also Anscombe (2015, p. 297), Geach (1954, 266–8), and Wiggins (2001, p. 69). All the above might be regarded as semantic elaborations of the Aristotelian idea that existence, for substances, is the actuality of a certain kind of activity (cf. Metaphysics Θ (Aristotle, 2016); for recent expositions see Beere 2012 and Kosman 2013). 32 This is quite a weak claim. It is much weaker, for instance, than the sortalist thesis that singling out requires having an adequate conception of the singled-out thing’s kind. However, there is clearly much more that needs to be said about the notion of singling out than I can attempt here. 33 This is a rough generalization. Perhaps there are exceptions: perhaps it is possible to think about an artefact while it is under construction. Or perhaps I can think about my future ham sandwich before the upper piece of bread is in place. But what will still be true is that the possibility of thinking about something before it substantially exists will depend on special considerations about the kinds of processes by which a thing of that kind comes into existence, the ways in which its constituent matter is assembled and transformed, and the ways in which a thinker can be party to those processes. Thus there are still broad temporal constraints on thinkability imposed and explained by the notion of substantial existence. 34 I leave it open whether an analogous account can be given of the priority of actual over merely possible existence. 35 The notion of temporal decentring was coined by Cromer (1971). For discussion see the contributions to Hoerl and McCormack (2001). 36 This point is appreciated by O’Shaughnessy: ‘[T]he ongoing of a process is not a distinct phenomenon from the happening of the event it constitutively realizes. How can the constituting of an event, as opposed to a material object, be distinct from the occurrence of the event? The object moves off into other times, and perhaps other places, and in this sense transcends is spatio-temporal beginnings, but the event does not … [an event] cannot cut itself adrift in the manner of an object’ (O’Shaughnessy, 1971, p. 222, emphasis in the original]. Puzzlingly, O’Shaughnessy nevertheless insists that the process which he calls the ‘constituting’ of the event is somehow distinct from the event itself. 37 See also (Thompson, 2008, pp. 21–2). A formal elaboration of this idea in the setting of a tense logic in the style of A. N. Prior is to be found in Galton (1984). Both Thompson and Rödl draw heavily, albeit critically, on Galton’s ‘event-logic’ in developing their accounts of event-forms. 38 The deflationary move I am extracting from Rödl’s remarks has a certain amount in common with the ‘easy ontology’ developed recently by Thomasson (2015). 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TI - Are Events Things of the Past?
JO - Mind
DO - 10.1093/mind/fzaa065
DA - 2021-02-14
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/are-events-things-of-the-past-TCEG9B0kb9
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -