The object : substance :: event : process Analogy

Linguists say that sentences are about events. Philosophers debate the metaphysics of event identity. Cognitive scientists posit event concepts to explain how creatures like us represent and reason about the world, and developmental psychologists ask how we come to have those concepts. But, do we mean the same thing by ‘event’ (Casati and Varzi 2008; cf. Goldman 2007)? Our project aims to resolve this question, in part, by studying the relationship between event semantics and event representations in the psychologist’s sense. Broadly, it explores the thesis that the semantic structure of event quantification, originally introduced into the literature with a metaphysical interpretation (Davidson 1967), reveals properties of how the mind structures its experience of the world.