Abstract

In a number of influential papers, Donald Davidson has argued the desirability of admitting events into our ontology. In this paper I will try to show that all of Davidson's arguments for events serve equally well to provide proper ontological credentials for states. As conceived here, states are like Davidsonian events in being unrepealable particulars; they differ only in not being changes. A state will always consist in an object's remaining the same in respect of some one or more properties during a time interval. Thus, a leaf's turning red would be an event; its remaining so, a state. In a brief final section, I will suggest some of the implications of my argument for semantics and general ontology.