display all the ideas for this combination of texts
6 ideas
| 15567 | Some events involve no change; they must, because causal histories involve unchanges [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Not all events involve change. We cannot afford to count the unchanges as nonevents, for the unchanges may be needed to complete causal histories. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], VI) | |
| A reaction: You end up calling non-changes 'events' if you commit to a simplistic theory that all causal histories consist of events. Why not allow conditions as well as events? Lewis concedes that he may be abusing language. |
| 15561 | The events that suit semantics may not be the events that suit causation [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: There is no guarantee that events made for semantics are the same as events that are causes and effects. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], I) | |
| A reaction: This little cri de couer could be a motto for a huge amount of analytic philosophy, which (for some odd reason) thought that mathematics, logic, set theory and formal semantics were good tools for explaining nature. |
| 15565 | Events have inbuilt essences, as necessary conditions for their occurrence [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Events have their essences built in, in the form of necessary conditions for their occurrence. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], III) | |
| A reaction: Revealing. He thinks the essence of an event is something which precedes the event. I take it as obvious that if an event has an essence, it will be some features of the event that occur in it and during it. They need to be intrinsic. |
| 15566 | Events are classes, and so there is a mereology of their parts [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If events are classes, as I propose, then they have a mereology in the way that all classes do: the parts of a class are its subclasses. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], V) | |
| A reaction: Lewis says events are properties, which he regards as classes. It is not clear that events are strictly mereological. Could one happening be two events? Is WWII a simple sum of its parts? [see p.260] |
| 15564 | An event is a property of a unique space-time region [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I propose to identify an event with a property, or in other words with a class, a unique spatio-temporal region corresponding to where that event occurs. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], II) | |
| A reaction: [I've run together two separate bits, on p.244 and 245] Lewis cites Montague's similar view, that events are properties of times. |
| 4048 | Infant brains appear to have inbuilt ontological categories [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: Infant behaviour implies inbuilt ontological categories of thing, place, event, path, action, sound, manner, amount and number. ...There is an algebra of relationships between them. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Phil Applications of Cognitive Science [1993], p.109) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. We would expect the categories in infant brains to have instrumental value, but we don't have to accept them as true. Adults (even Aristotle) are big infants. |