Why are Events, Facts, and States of Affairs Different?

Abstract

This article claims that events, facts and states of affairs need to be differentiated. It takes as a starting point Chisholm’s (1976) claim that only his ontology of states of affairs explains effectively thirteen sentences related to propositions and events. He does this by reducing propositions and events to states of affairs. We argue that our ontology also solves those problems. We defend a hierarchized Platonist ontology that has concrete entities (objects and events) and abstract entities (properties, facts and states of affairs). The distinctions we propose allow us to explain the pre-analytic data analyzed by Chisholm without reducing entities. We claim that our ontology provides a different way of explaining that data, and is, thus, promissory.