Symposium Contribution on Events and Their Names by Jonathan Bennett

Abstract

A book is a mirror. Bennett's -book of eighty-six subtitled sections is a many-faceted, multimirrored sphere rotating above the darkened ballroom where events dance intimately with companion facts. If a reviewer looks in, many reviewers look back with new beliefs adopted because of Bennett's persuasion, some but not all contrary to earlier beliefs. The thoroughly agreeable review, an endangered species, can illustrate general remarks of commendation with professions of such beliefs. In this symposium, one can take the commendation for granted; this is a place for contention. If a reviewer looks in, reviewers look back with new beliefs adopted in reaction to Bennett, some but not all modify earlier beliefs Bennett would have us abandon completely. ZDS, is, Zapping them with Disjunctive Syllogism, is a familiar move in exact philosophy. In Section 56, Bennett shows how ZDS ruins an attempt to define simplicity of properties in terms of entailment relations between predicates. In Section 79, Bennett reports a very similar move by Castafteda trivializes a proposed condition for level generation. But ZDS and its kin annoy the just and unjust alike. It makes trouble for Bennett's own treatmentof causation. Bennett replaces Mackie's notion of an INUS condition with the notion of an NS condition, a Necessary part of a Sufficient Condition (Section 18). He provides an account of what it is for the fact P to be an NS condition of the fact Q that is expressed in hard logic, with none of the messy complications counterfactual conditionals bring with them. (The account itself resembles 1940's-style treatments of counterfactual conditionals.) In this formulation, L is the conjunction of all causal laws: