Event Concepts

to appear in: F. Shipley and J. Zacks (eds.), Understanding Events: How Humans See, Represent, and Act on Events, New York: Oxford University Press.The concept of an event, and of event representation, is an umbrella notion. We provided an overview of different ways events have been dealt with in philosophy and in linguistics and, to a minor extent, in cognitive science. The variety of positions is construed in part as the result of different descriptive and explanatory projects. In particular, we urge that various types of notion be kept apart: common-sense, theoretically revised, scientific, and internalist psychological notions. The philosophical literature has applied the standard test of making different notions interact; the interactions of the notion of an event with neighboring notions, such as that of an object, of cause, of space and time, have been tested. Results so fare are not conclusive. Contextual effects abound that can pull intuitions in very different directions. And the methodology itself is largely based on material that may be in need of close scrutiny, as it draws from linguistic evidence, non-linguistic intuitions, and sometimes examples from scientific descriptions of the external world