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Questions tagged [events]

22 questions
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If nothing happens, does time still pass?

This question may have been asked before; actually, it's definitely been asked before, since it's on the topic of whether time is real or a man-made construct, but I don't believe it has yet been asked in this specific way. We have 2 events, A and…
joshuaronis
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Decreasing quantifiers and entailment in event semantics

Consider the sentences (1) All dogs bark. (2) All dogs bark loudly. In event semantics the logical form of (1) is (∃e,x) every(x) & dog(x) & bark(e,x). As for (2), one would add the conjunct loud(e). The latter formula implies the former, as one…
Atamiri
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Davidson, events, and states

Davidson argues that events are individuals. According to him, the meaning of Brutus stabbed Caesar is ∃e.stab(e,Brutus,Caesar), that is, there was a stabbing, Brutus did it, and Caesar underwent it. Likewise, Caesar died means ∃e.die(e, Caesar). Is…
Atamiri
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Difference between mental states and mental events?

What is the main difference between mental states and mental events in philosophy of mind? I heard from a lecturer that mental events are those entities which occur instantly or in short period of time such as a headache but mental states are more…
Arian
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Can an accident be prevented?

There's a whole safety industry that I'm sure will say they can be prevented, but do they really? I looked up the word's definition: accident | ˈaksədənt | noun an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause — Any…
Vita
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If all things come to an end, then wouldn't all things coming to an end itself end?

I saw this question here https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/18991/translating-all-things-come-to-an-end-to-latin and immediately I thought "if all things come to an end, then the action of all things ending eventually itself comes to an…
askquestions4
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What are the characteristics of an event according to Whitehead?

Throughout Concept of Nature Whitehead adds different types of characteristics to his most basic concept - events. For example, he talks of objects, the situation of the event in space and time, its relation to other events et cetra. I kind of…
Yechiam Weiss
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Are our intuitions about probability not wrong after all?

Many people feel as if significant events are less probable. For example, some may feel as if the sequence of all heads on a coin is less probable than any other sequence. Or that the next lottery draw numbers being the same as the last winning draw…
thinkingman
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What is the probability of events that don’t seem clearly defined?

It makes sense to talk about the probability of a series of coin tosses but what about seeing a TV on a wall, or seeing a person riding a bicycle on the street? If one were to compare an event such as a person riding a bicycle on the street vs. a…
thinkingman
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Is similarity an objective property? Should other similar events be taken into account when evaluating the probability of an event?

Suppose a rare event occurs. For example, suppose someone wins two lotteries in a year. This may have happened because it was rigged or because of chance. The defender of the chance hypothesis could point to how given that thousands of lotteries are…
thinkingman
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Does the bounded event constraint mean we cannot talk about events that occur now ending?

Carlotta Smith in the paper Reference Time without Tense in Recent Advances in the Syntax and Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality volume imposes the following condition. The Bounded Event Constraint. Bounded situations are not located at Speech…
user62727
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What qualifies as being 'part of' the state of affairs for an event?

In the book "Norms and Actions" by Georg Henrik Von Wright, an event is said to be an ordered pair of states of affairs, where the initial state of affairs transitions or changes to an end state of…
Richard Bamford
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For Whitehead, is an event theoretical or ontological?

I'm getting to Whitehead in my reading list, and have started with "Concept of Nature". Have not finished it yet, but something disturbs me throughout the book (aside from his god-awful convoluted writing style). It seems that events, for Whitehead,…
Yechiam Weiss
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Are there any arguments for why something past-eternal must necessarily be future-eternal as well?

If we assume that something has always existed in the past, what reason is there to assume that it won't perish in the future? I pondered on it and I wondered whether the following argument works: because it is assumed to be past-eternal, it would…
user3776022
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Another name for "non-events"

According to Davidson, a sentence like Brutus stabbed Caesar can be represented as ∃e.stab(Brutus,Caesar), where e is a reified event. Is there a term for something that's not an event? I first thought of "entity" or "individual" but both terms are…
Atamiri
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