On the Logical Form of Some Commonplace Action Expressions*

In a fascinating exposition, Dazeley and Gombocz (1979) study the logical analysis of the verb facere given by St. Anselm of Canterbury in Lambeth Manuscript 59.1 According to St. Anselm, someone slaying a man with a sword is said to facere that the man is dead. Other cases elaborated by St. Anselm include facere non esse, non facere esse, and non facere non esse. From these cases, St. Anselm shows how a surprisingly quite general grammar of many interesting forms of facere can be generated. What makes this account particularly fascinating to contemporary readers is that it is very suggestive of modern modal logic as a syntax of some commonplace verbal expressions. As Dazeley and Gombocz point out, facere has no single precise counterpart in English. Yet one cannot help thinking that one way of representing at least one sense of facere is suggested by saying that when someone slays a man with a sword, the proposition 'The second man is dead' is something made true by the first man. Syntactically, facere may be thought of as a modal operator on a proposition. It is tempting indeed to explore these parallels further, but clearly there is a great risk of anachronism. For as Dazeley and Gombocz remind us, St. Anselm never used words like 'made it true that' or other terms familiar to present-day action theorists and other speakers