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wkap.com>* FACT PROPOSITION EVENT by Philip L. Peterson, Syracuse University, NY `Peterson is an authority of a philosophical and linguistic industry that began in the 1960s with Vendler's work on nominalization. Natural languages distinguish syntactically and semantically between various sorts of what might be called `gerundive entities' - events, processes, states of affairs, propositions, facts, ... all referred to by sentence nominals of various kinds. Philosophers have worried for millennia over the ontology of such things or `things', but until twenty years ago they ignored all the useful linguistic evidence. Vendler not only began to straighten out the distinctions, but pursued more specific and more interesting questions such as that of what entities the causality relation relates (events? facts?). And that of the objects of knowledge and belief. But Vendler's work was only a start and Peterson has continued the task from then until now, both philosophically and linguistically. Fact Proposition Event constitutes the state of the art regarding gerundive entities, defended in meticulous detail. Contents: Introduction. Part I: On Facts and Propositions. 1. How to Infer Belief from Knowledge. 2. Propositions and the Philosophy of Language. Part II: On Events. 3. On Representing Event Reference. 4. Event. 5. What Causes Effects? 6. Anaphoric Reference to Facts, Propositions, and Events. Part III: On Complex Events. 7. The Natural Logic of Complex Event Expressions. 8. Complex Events. Part IV: On Actions and `Cause's. 9. The Grimm Events of Causation. 10. Four Grammatical Hypotheses on Actions, Causes, and `Causes'. 11. Causation, Agency, and Natural Actions. Part V: On Causation Statements and Laws. 12. Facts, Events, and Semantic Emphasis in Causal Statements. 13. Which Universals are Natural Laws? Notes. Bibliography. Index. STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY 66 1997 432 pp. Hardbound ISBN 0-7923-4568-1 $150.00Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
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