ABSTRACT
This is why I follow Davidson (1980 Essay 8) in reserving the term 'event' for a sort of particular. By this I mean that, like people, animals, plants and inanimate things, events correspond only to names and other referring terms, not to true sentences [1.2]. But we need to know more about particulars than this, since this fact about them does not distinguish them from entities of other sorts which I shall also need to invoke later in this account of causation. Specifically, it does not distinguish them from universals, i.e. from properties, like having a certain mass, and relations, like being a certain distance apart. For properties and relations can also be referred to by names and other terms, such as 'I kilogramme' and 'the mass of the sun', or '25 kilometres' and 'the distance between Cambridge and London'; and they too do not correspond to true sentences.
