Concepts from Event Semantics in Cognition

Common sense intuition distinguishes between events and regular objects; events happen, after all, and objects don’t. This distinction is deployed in linguistics, psychology and philosophy. Linguists say that sentences describe events, while nouns describe objects. Psychologists describe the principles of event perception, and philosophers debate the metaphysics of event identity. But how do these various discussions relate to each other? Casati and Varzi (2008) emphasize the importance of delimiting ‘common sense’ understandings from theoretical usages; it could turn out that the representations posited to explain object or event perception share important common features, and that neither obviously resemble what is actually ‘out there’. Worse, what determines whether a given portion of experience falls into a particular event category can seem intimately bound up with the language that we use to describe it (e.g. chase versus flee). A prominent strand of theorizing in natural language semantics holds that the basic logic of sentences involves a hidden ‘event variable’, posited to explain the intuitive validity of a wide variety of productive inferences in natural language (e.g. from A kicked B in the shin to A kicked B; Davidson 1967). It has sometimes also been taken to burden the theorist with substantial ontological commitments. In contrast, some views suggest that understanding the ‘event variable’ is a fundamentally cognitive question (see Pietroski 2015). This symposium aims to illuminate the psychological notion of ‘event’ from the perspective of event semantics, connecting posits in formal semantics to shared aspects of our perception and cognition. For the semanticist, such attempts encourage a different understanding of the entities that populate our models. For the psychologist, they suggest a rich arena in which to derive empirically-testable predictions about the mind. And, for the philosopher, they could provide new insight into why the common sense notion of ‘event’ has the structure that it does (Casati & Varzi 2008). Two questions are broadly relevant here: what is the relationship between formal semantics and cognitive science? And, how can results in formal semantics be used to generate predictions about how the mind works? More specifically, what structure does natural language semantics imply for event perception and cognition? Investigating these questions will enhance interdisciplinary research on events from a lesser-explored perspective in cognitive science.