Chapter 8 - Objections

Summary

I consider a range of objections to the identity of negative actions and positive events, which have appeared in the recent literature. Most of these objections are appeals to Leibniz’s Law: they attempt to show that a certain negative action can’t be identical to a certain positive event, because these entities have different properties (e.g. different spatiotemporal locations, modal profiles, or causal roles). I show that these objections rely on confusions (e.g. between the things we do and our particular doings of them, or between action sentences and nominals which purport to denote particular doings). Thus, we can (and in the light of the previous chapters, we should) identify negative actions with positive events.