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On the Metaphysical Distinction Between Processes and Events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Kathleen Gill
Kathleen Gill*
Affiliation:
St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN56301, USA
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Extract

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle pointed out that some activities are engaged in for their own sake, while others are directed at some end. The test for distinguishing between them is to ask, ‘At any time during a period in which someone is Xing, is it also true that they have Xed?’ If both are true, the activity is being done for its own sake. If not, it is being done for the sake of some end other than itself. For example, if I am thinking, it is true that I have thought. But if I’m making a blouse, it is not true that I have made a blouse, at least not this particular blouse. That’s not true until I have completed the project.

There have been a number of attempts to deepen our understanding of this distinction. Anthony Kenny devoted a chapter of Action, Emotion, and Will to this issue, exploring the effect tense has on implication relations, and using that as a basis for dividing verbs of action into state-verbs, activity-verbs and performance-verbs. In more recent years the trend has been to generalize these categories so as to include occurrences other than actions, i.e., occurrences which do not involve intentions. While interest in this area tends to focus primarily on linguistic issues, such as the categorization of verbs, or on the logical analysis of sentences, there has been some interest in related metaphysical issues. In 1978 Alexander Mourelatos published ‘Events, Processes, and States,’ a paper which has turned out to be quite influential, in which he proposes an ontological trichotomy of occurrences. In his view, processes and events form distinct categories within the general category of occurrences. In this paper I will examine the reasoning underlying Mourelatos’s claim, arguing that the differences between processes and events cannot provide the basis for an ontological subcategorization of occurrences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 365 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1993

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References

1 See Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX.6. Except for the qualification that the blouse I have not made be the one I’m working on, this account of Aristotle is taken from Lear’s, Jonathan Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press 1988), 105Google Scholar. The need for the qualification is noted by Parsons, T. in Events in the Semantics of English: A Study of Subatomic Semantics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1990), 183Google Scholar. Parsons also notes that ‘A is Xing only if A has Xed’ is doubtful for the beginnings of certain processes, such as walking.

In comments on this paper, Mourelatos has pointed out that Aristotle’s kinesis/energeia distinction does not correspond to the Kenny-Vendler distinction between performances and activities. He notes, for instance, that while activities are not goal-directed, energeia ‘constitute at once both an ongoing engagement and the fulfillment provided directly by that engagement.’ Aristotle uses stative verbs as examples of energeia, e.g., ‘see,’ ‘understand,’ ‘be happy.’ For a full account, see Graham, Daniel W. ‘States and Performances: Aristotle’s Test,’ The Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1980) 117-30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Mourelatos, Alexander ‘Events, Processes, and States,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 2 (1978) 415-34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Page numbers used in these notes correspond to the reprinted version, which appears in Tedeschi, P. and Zaenen, A. eds., Syntax and Semantics (San Diego, CA: Academic Press 1981)Google Scholar. As the title suggests, Mourelatos’s trichotomy is formed by distinguishing among events, processes, and states.

3 F.J. Pelletier has argued that every mass noun can be given a count sense, and that every count noun can be given a mass sense. ‘Non-Singular Reference,’ in Pelletier, F.J. ed., Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems (Boston, MA: Reidel 1979), 1-14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Mourelatos, 209

5 Galton (The Logic of Aspect [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984], 28) is not very hopeful about this, stating that the parallel, though often noted, is unhelpful because no logical analysis of mass and count nouns has yet been developed. However, it is evident that considerable progress has been made recently in this area. See ‘Mass Expressions’ by Pelletier, F.J. and Schubert, L.K. in Gabbay, D. ed., Handbook of Philosophical Logic (Boston, MA: Kluwer 1989)Google Scholar. Parsons uses Davidson’s analysis (combined with Panini’s) as a starting point for his own work, saying that ‘the loss of interest in [Davidson’s) theory is understandable but mistaken’ (5). See also Roeper’s, Peter ‘Abstraction for Events and Processes,’ Journal of Philosophical Logic 16 (1987) 273-307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Mourelatos, 209

7 See Pelletier and Schubert, ‘Mass Expressions.’

8 Mourelatos, 204. The example is taken from Vendler’s, Z. Linguistics in Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1967), 101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 This description of Dowty is taken from Verkuyl, H.J. ‘Aspectual Classes and Aspectual Composition,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989), 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Galton, 26.

10 Taylor’s, Barry work on this issue first appeared in ‘Tense and Continuity,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 1 (1977) 199-220Google Scholar. References here will be to the version found in Taylor’s Modes of Occurrence (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell 1985), 58-80.

11 Taylor, 71

12 Taylor, 73

13 Verkuyl, H.J. ‘Thematic Relations and the Semantic Representation of Verbs Expressing Change,’ Studies in Language 2 (1978), 224CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Taylor, 69

15 Chappell, V.C. ‘Stuff and Things,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1970) 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Wallace, John ‘Some Logical Roles of Adverbs,’ The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971) 704CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Wallace, 705

18 See Lacey, A.R. ‘The Eleatics and Aristotle on Some Problems of Change,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965) 451-68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Galton states that ‘Events … essentially involve change’ (27). And Lombard, Larry in Events: A Metaphysical Study (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986)Google Scholar, provides a discussion of events in terms of an object’s changing. In Events and Their Names (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1988), Jonathan Bennett defends the view that events are supervenient on spatiotemporal zones.

20 Galton, 140

21 Parsons, T. ‘The Progressive in English: Events, States and Processes,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989) 213-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Bennett, ‘Of Tense and Aspect: One Analysis,’ in Tedeschi and Zaenen, eds., Syntax and Semantics

22 Mourelatos, 209-10

23 Parsons, Events in the Semantics of English, 167

24 Mourelatos, 204

25 Parsons, Events in the Semantics of English, 184

26 Ibid., 24

27 Ibid., 185

28 Ibid., 21

29 Smith, Carlota The Parameter of Aspect (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Ibid., 52

31 Ibid., 11

32 Ibid.; Kamp, H. and Rohrer, C. A Discourse Representation Theory Account of Tense in French (ms. 1989), 15-16Google Scholar

33 Castaneda, Hector-Neri ‘Conventional Aspects of Human Action, Its Time, and Its Place,’ Dialogue 19 (1980), 442CrossRefGoogle Scholar