ELEMENTS FOR A TOPOGRAPHY OF STATES OF AFFAIRS. (FIRST PART: TIME)

Abstract

We present a description of the world in terms of states of affairs and its changes, changes which, on their own, can be understood as dynamic states of affairs. Notions like continuity, variation of properties through time, rate of change and other measurable magnitudes will be relevant for the analysis. Anyway, the speakers can choose to typify changes as changes or as a new kind of state of affair, a dynamic one, and this decision will bring out different consequences in the causal roles to be ascribed to those changes. Thus we show both those features of reality that are available and those that are not available for arbitrary control by the speaker, beyond the current theoretical framework. Due to word limit, we are concerned only with the temporal analysis, leaving aside the spatial one.