Adverbs of Action

Abstract

Davidson defends the analysis of adverbial modification he gave in Essay 6, according to which adverbial clauses are correctly analysed as predicates of events. Working through a number of examples, Davidson re‐examines (i) his views on the individuation of actions and events with respect to their places and times, (ii) their description‐relativity when it comes to characterizing them as intentional, and (iii) the validity of entailments licensed on his formalization of action sentences. Conceding various difficulties faced by his theory, he optimistically concludes that events ‘once more seem on a par, ontologically, with familiar objects’ because they share some of those problems with them (see Appendix B).