Processes as Continuants (Abstract)

Abstract

Summary form only given. In philosophy it is common to introduce a high-level ontological distinction between continuants and occurrents. Continuants are entities which endure through time: for this reason, they are also called endurants. A continuant can undergo change and yet preserve its identity through those changes. Its parts are spatial parts, and it exists, as a whole, at each moment of its lifetime - notwithstanding the possibility that at different moments that whole might consist of different parts. Occurrents, on the other hand, are extended in time: they `perdure' (hence, they are called perdurants). Unlike continuants, occurrents have temporal parts, e.g., the first half of the concert and the second half of the concert. Because an occurrent as a whole spans the time period from its beginning to its end, it cannot be said to change (although it may be a change), and it does not exist, as a whole, at any one moment during its temporal extent. In this paper, the author proposes a radical view of processes as continuants rather than occurrents. Processes, like objects but unlike events, can be the subject of change: the water flow increases, the heartbeat speeds up, music becomes louder. A corollary of this is that our snapshot of the world at one time must contain processes as well as objects; snapshots are thus not static but have an intrinsic dynamism which may be thought of as providing the 'power source' for the generation of events. He uses Lyons' (1977) distinction between experiential and historical modes of description to underpin the essential contrast between, on the one hand, the world of dynamic snapshots containing objects and processes, and on the other hand, the fixed history of events as faits accomplis, as it were the fossil record of once-active processes. He shall show that this idea is entirely in accordance with standard mathematical ways of modelling the changing world, provides an appropriate explanatory framework for handling the phenomenon of aspect in natural language, and can even throw light on ancient puzzles such as Zeno's arrow paradox. Finally, he shall also indicate how the conception of processes as continuants can provide a sound basis for the logical modelling of dynamical systems