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ABSTRACT
The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of the influential verb typology developed by Zeno Vendler for recent debates in the philosophy of perception. Section one explains the verb typology and explains how Vendler applies it to different perceptual notions. Section two identifies various questions that arise from observations in Vendler’s paper that suggest that there is a match between the temporal properties of perceptual verb objects and the complex verb phrases of which they are a part. Subsequent discussion focuses on just one of these questions. Section three identifies and rejects a simple proposal about how to answer this question. Section four develops a ‘limited matching’ account. In the visual perception of events and processes there seems to be a match between the temporal duration, order and location of the events and processes which are the objects of perception and the subject’s perceiving them. But this matching is absent in cases of the perception of primary substances; objects which manifestly endure over time. Section five identifies and responds to some criticisms of this matching account. The conclusion notes some consequences of the discussion for contemporary debates about the temporal characteristics of perception.
Acknowledgments
Material from this paper has been presented in talks at the University of Warwick, King’s College, London, the University of Cambridge and the University of Chicago. Thanks to the audiences on those occasions. I am grateful to Jack Shardlow, Tristan Kreetz, Bill Brewer, Christoph Hoerl and Michael Kremer for helpful comments. Thanks to Ian Phillips, Hemdat Lerman, Guy Longworth and Rowland Stout for very helpful written comments on earlier drafts of this material. I owe particular thanks to Matthew Soteriou for very helpful discussions about ideas in this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For work in formal semantics that is shaped by Vendler’s verb typology and the research questions it focuses, see Dowty Citation1979, Taylor Citation1985, Bach Citation1986, Verkuyl Citation1993 and Rothstein Citation2004. Mourelatos Citation1978 includes influential criticisms of Vendler (Citation1967a) and attempts to develop an ontology of process that nevertheless develops many ideas from his work.
2. For work in the philosophy of mind and action that includes discussion of Vendler (Citation1967a), and exploits an ontology that develops Vendler’s discussion see Steward Citation1997, Thompson Citation2008, Crowther Citation2009, Soteriou Citation2013, and Hornsby Citation2012.
3. For related discussion see also Sibley Citation1955.
4. It is also worth registering the thought that it is at least part of the truth that Vendler’s approach to these verb forms is systematic and putatively exhaustive in a way that Ryle’s piecemeal approach – an approach rooted in what he needs for his polemical purposes in the relevant works – is not. Thanks to Michael Kremer here.
5. For some of Vendler’s own reflections on these issues of method, see Vendler (Citation1967b, essay 1). For discussion of philosophical method in Cook Wilson and Austin that is relevant to these issues see Longworth, Citationforthcoming.
6. For discussion of perceptual activities such as watching and looking see O’Shaughnessy Citation2000, Crowther Citation2009, Soteriou Citation2013 and Kalderon Citation2017.
7. Though Ryle (Citation1949) discusses verbs with grammatical objects – for example, at (Citation1949, 130–147) – he fails to note that there are questions that can be raised about the relation between the temporal characteristics of the whole verb phrase and the verb object.
8. It was the insight of these observations, I suggest, that prompted a generation of researchers in the infant discipline of formal semantics to turn their attentions towards attempts to understand the relationship between temporal properties of verb objects and verb phrases. For a contribution to these questions, as well as an overview of post-Vendler developments in the formal semantics of verb aspect grounded in a discussion of features of the framework suggested in his paper, see Rothstein Citation2004.
9. The discussion that follows draws on claims about the perception of events made in Soteriou Citation2010, Citation2013, and Phillips Citation2010, Citation2014a, Citation2014b. I make no claims about Soteriou’s and Phillips’s commitments with respect to the specific questions posed at the end of section 3, nor about the limited matching account developed below.
10. See Rothstein (Citation2004, ch. 3) for detailed discussion of resultant accomplishments.
11. If ‘seeing Carmen’ is instead understood as the state of being perceptually aware of Carmen, things are more complex. Adopting Vendler’s suggestion would be to take the perceptual state of seeing Carmen to be a kind of accomplishment. The idea that any state could be a kind of accomplishment has generally been rejected. (See, for example, Rothstein Citation2004, 14–7) Here the thought is that if, say, the glass was fragile from t1–t10 then it was fragile at any point throughout, or during any sub-interval of t1–t10. One way to explain the failure of the perceptual state to be an accomplishment might be to hold that one sees Carmen in virtue of seeing a temporal part or phase of Carmen. And that state predication will not show the characteristics of an accomplishment. (Thanks to Rowland Stout here.) But there are other possibilities. For example, Matthew Soteriou (Citation2010, Citation2013) has argued that when perceptual states take events for their objects, for example, the visual perception of movement over an interval of time, they exhibit some of the characteristic behaviour of accomplishments, including failure to be ‘homogeneous down to instants’. Soteriou’s argument turns on consequences of his view that the obtaining of perceptual states over intervals time constitutively depends on perceptual activities or occurrences which go on over those times. These issues cannot be pursued further here. What ought to be noted then is that even if we understand ‘seeing Carmen’ as a state of visual awareness, there is a route to defending Vendler’s claim that there is a ‘queer accomplishment sense’ of ‘seeing’. I leave these further issues open. (For critical discussion of Soteriou’s discussion of non-homogeneous states see Steward Citation2018).
12. See, in particular, the discussions in Stout Citation1997, Citation2016.
13. For related argument against the occurrent continuants thesis see Soteriou Citation2018.
14. Thanks to Jack Shardlow for pressing me about this line of objection, despite disagreeing with it.
15. For discussion of these issues see Hofweber and Velleman Citation2011, Fine Citation[2006] 2008, Crisp and Smith Citation2005, Mackinnon Citation2002, Donnelly Citation2011. I will discuss the bearing of questions about the temporal characteristics of activities and processes on questions about the persistence of substance over time and debates about the nature of endurantism in more detail elsewhere.
16. More specifically, they have focussed on the temporal properties of perceptual experience of events and processes. I set aside complications concerning the relation between the claims made above and claims about the temporal aspects of experience. This is a matter for fuller discussion elsewhere. I note that in the recent literature a number of writers have turned attention to the apparent endurance of objects. See for example Prosser Citation2016, ch. 6. Prosser’s discussion builds on ideas suggested in Velleman Citation2006.
17. Similarly, Dainton (Citation2014), suggests that ‘temporal experience’ is to be understood simply as ‘experience of change and succession’. Pelczar (Citation2010) suggests that questions about the temporal properties of experience are questions about the temporal properties of experiences of change.
18. See Soteriou Citation2013, ch. 5 for further discussion of these ideas. See Crowther and Soteriou Citation2017 for relevant discussion of the links between temporal representation and the wakeful condition.
19. The significance of attitudes towards oneself over time as a source of intuitions about the endurance of objects is a theme of J. David Velleman 2006. In his first Amherst Lecture, Velleman’s aim is not merely to trace intuitions about endurance to this source, but to diagnose a confusion at the core of this intuition. These issues go beyond what I can discuss here.