Events and Event Talk An Introduction

We speak of actions and other events with the same easiness with which we speak of people and other objects. We say of John that he is bright and of Bill's lecture that it is boring. We say of John's father that he is taller than Bill's and of John's life that it is better than Bill's. We say of Clark Kent that he is Superman and of Clark Kent's death that it is the death of Superman. The pervasive-ness of this talk does not by itself imply that there are such things as events— that events are to be included in an inventory of the world over and above people and material objects. But one can hardly question that some theory of events is needed if one is to make sense of such talk at all. Moreover, we often speak in such a way as to suggest—implicitly—that we are talking about events. We say that Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife. If this statement is taken to assert that a certain three-place relation obtains among Brutus, Caesar, and a knife, then it is hard to explain why our statement entails that Brutus stabbed Caesar (a statement that involves a different, two-place relation). But if we take our statement to assert that a certain event occurred (namely, a stabbing of Caesar by Brutus) and that it had a certain property (namely, of being done with a knife), then the entailment is straightforward. Again, these reasons do not constitute a proof that there are such entities as events. But if we are interested in an account of how it is that certain statements mean what they mean, and if the meaning of a statement is at least in part determined by its logical relations to other statements, then one can hardly ignore the relevance of facts such as these. In the last five decades, these considerations have been the focus of considerable debate among philosophers, as well as among linguists and logicians. 1 Especially since the publication of Donald Davidson's (1967b) article 'The Logical Form of Action Sentences', it has been generally agreed that a great many natural language phenomena can be explained if (and—according to some