Abstract
One of the salient developments in recent metaphysics is the increasing popularity of material plenitude: roughly, the thesis that wherever there is one material object there is in fact a great multitude of co-located but numerically distinct objects that differ principally in which of their properties they have essentially and which accidentally. Here I argue that we have at least as much reason to look favorably on event plenitude: wherever one event occurs there occur a great multitude of co-located but numerically distinct events that differ principally in which of their properties they have essentially and which accidentally. I argue, first, that the standard reasons to adopt material plenitude extend fairly straightforwardly to events, and secondly, that only event plenitude can protect the plausible idea that causality is an extensional relation.
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Notes
A natural response is that what we have here are just two different descriptions of one and the same object, but as Fine (2003) has shown, this comes with very many costs.
Davidson himself discussed certain cases of intuitively different but perfectly co-located events, but the cases he discussed were structurally somewhat different. He writes: “For example, if a metal ball becomes warmer during a certain minute, and during the same minute rotates through 35 degrees, must we say these are the same event? It would seem not.” (Davidson, 1969: 178) The metal ball clearly undergoes two changes: a change in temperature and a change in position. To the extent that changes are events, we have here, intuitively, two distinct though perfectly co-located events. As noted, to me this type of case seems structurally disanalogous to the cases in which the difference is in the first instance really just in identity and persistence conditions. Still, they too generate some pressure toward pluralism.
In addition, it should be noted that even if material plenitude obviated the need for event plenitude, it would still be interesting to some metaphysicians that there’s an argument for event plenitude that philosophers working in the metaphysics of material objects have found compelling. I have in mind those metaphysicians who hold that events are the only fundamental beings, and that concrete particulars, if they exist, are somehow “built up” out of events. Within this outlook, sometimes called “event ontology” or “process ontology,” the two-step argument for event plenitude is not made superfluous by the availability of a structurally parallel two-step argument for material-object plenitude.
Relatedly, I would also insist that talk of events having causal powers (as opposed to just causal effects) is actually quite awkward. Events don’t sit around hoarding powers of action. That is something objects do. And when these objects exercise their causal powers, that’s when an event occurs – indeed, that is just what the occurrence of an event is.
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Kriegel, U. Event plenitude. Synthese 204, 54 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04640-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04640-w