Causation, Supervenience, and Method. Reflections on Jonathan Bennett's Events and Their Names

This vastly learned, instructive, and entertaining book is full of good things. Some are cameo gems, such as the plea to treat identity not relationally but through simple predication, and the decision, following Locke and Donald Williams, to treat the term 'abstract' as the antonym of 'concrete', carrying no implications of extra-spatio-temporality or causal nullity. Others are more substantial achievements, such as the successful negative treatment of events as Quinean concrete totalities, and the extended discussion of the 'by' locution. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a deep disharmony between various key theses of the book, which can be fitted to one another with difficulty if at all. Facts are to be distinguished from events. The distinction is not total, for facts and events both belong to the same category, that of tropes. But facts are more fine-grained. The fact that Peter swam to Calais is a different fact from the fact that he journeyed there. But there are not two superimposed events, Peter's swim and Peter's journey. The journey is the swim. The swim is the journey. Events are tropes which can have an extensive nature undisclosed by the description through which we pick them out.. But with facts you see is what you get. The full identifying character of a fact is presented by the fact-stating sentence from which its nominal derives. Now this distinction within the, category of tropes is not in itself a source of any difficulty. But troubles arise when we explore what tropes are held to be, and what causal role is claimed for them. Bennett has two working definitions of a trope: a trope is an instance of a property. At p. 15, the paradigm is the whiteness of my house, and the property is exemplified by a substance (the house). At p. 88 it is always a spacetime zone which instantiates a property and thus constitutes a trope. So the

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