States, Events, and Truth-makers

Abstract

In the last decade, the debate about the ontological foundations of reified temporal logics (RTLs) has been relatively quiet, even though we think some problems still exist. In this paper, we identify some of these problems and propose (partial) solutions to them in a FOL framework. States are here characterized (at the syntactic level) as truth-makers of propositions—they reify true propositions— and events are built from states. These choices make the event-state distinction much crisper than the one characterized in terms of the (meta-)predicates HOLDS vs. OCCURS, which are necessary in RTLs but not in our theory. We also offer some epistemological arguments in favor of this choice.