Kicking Stones and Other Acts, Processes and Events .

History is about events, but what, if anything, is an event?

I observed that though we are satisfied his [Berkeley’s] doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I
never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against
a large stone, till he rebounded from it,—“I refute it thus.”
—James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LlD, (Aetat. 54)

On August 6, 1763, outside St Nicholas church in Harwich, Essex, James Boswell and Samuel
Johnson were discussing George Berkeley’s ingenious philosophical diversion: that someone can only
know about their perception of an object and not that the object has a reality beyond the perception.
History is about events, but what, if anything, is an event? Johnson could at least kick a stone
to demonstrate its reality, but no one could kick the event itself, not when it was happening, not after.
Unlike stones, events aren’t the kind of thing you can kick. So what kind of thing are they then?
Even though now we only have his word for it, Boswell saw Johnson kick that stone. We
could ask whether there really are such things as events but to avoid contemporary versions of
Berkeley’s ‘ingenious sophistries’ I will assume for now our usual manner of speaking about events,
ignore questions about whether or not we should be committing ourselves ontologically to such
fleeting beings, and consider some related questions, epistemological, taxonomical, and logical: how
do we observe or otherwise know about so-called events? what kinds of events do we recognise? and
how do we identify events and distinguish one event from another? My main concern is social or
intersubjective: what we talk about when we talk about events. It’s not subjective or
phenomenological; it’s not just what I experience when I experience them.
Event is a general term for anything that happens. External or physical events, while they are
happening, can directly or by some instrument be more or less perceived by the senses. They can be
observed, as they say, empirically. A materialist at heart, I think all events, even mental experiences
— which we may well take to be the events that are the most immediate, knowable and indubitable,
while also inner, private, and unknowable for others — are in a crucial sense non-mental, external or
physical too. This paragraph glides over more philosophy than bears thinking about. It stacks would-
be synonyms like ‘external’, ‘physical’ and ‘non-mental’ without the precaution of scare quotes. Bear
with me. I am just sketching ideas using backyard philosophical terms because I am only interested in
the epistemology of ordinary usage and the taxonomy derived from it. Sure, this backyard of ordinary
English usage looks like it belongs to an empiricist. I know there is no agreed ordinary usage,
epistemology or taxonomy. Why would everyday philosophy differ from academic philosophy in this
respect? But when it comes to ordinary communication we make allowances for this. Intersubjectivity
demands that we are to some degree charitable about what one another mean.
Acts, and actions, are events too — that is, they happen too. But among events, an act is one
that someone — or some doer — does, and so is distinguished from other events that just happen
without anyone doing them. Usually we would say that acts are done for a reason, the doer does
something with some intention or because of some motive or compulsion. Physical acts such as
kicking a stone can, as physical events, be perceived by the senses, but there is a difference. To know
what sort of act it is we need to perceive its intention or reason. Even if we do not know the full
reason, we still observe that something is intended in or motivating an act. To name an act is to imply
some intention or motive. A passer-by sees Johnson strike his foot with mighty force against a large
stone. Even if he thinks Johnson might be mad, he can see that Johnson somehow intends his striking.
He is kicking the stone, not stubbing his toe. The action can be denoted by several descriptions and we
typically describe an act according to some interpretation of its intention. Contact is not only being
made between his toe and the stone, he is making contact between his toe and the stone. He is also
demonstrating an epistemological principle, refuting Boswell’s proposition, and refuting Berkeley’s
too. Boswell knows this, though a passer-by might not. Our observer can see that Johnson is not the
passive victim of some unexpected reflex. He also sees that Johnson is not suffering a misadventure
such as tripping or stubbing while intending to do something else like dancing or limbering up. So a
new question arises. Isn’t tripping a bona fide action which, nevertheless, fails to satisfy the condition
of intention? And what about when the doer does not have any explicit intention? Doers often act
without being conscious the intention of their act. They might only experience an intention in

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retrospect when they reflect on what they have done. Intentional descriptions even of one’s own
actions are often retrospective interpretations. Like all attempts to question our ordinary ways of
talking about things we quickly come across shortcomings in our assumptions or definitions or
findings. In response, we might refine our concept and say that acts fit into a system of intentions that
includes also frustrated, unsatisfied or unformulated intentions, or unconscious motives or compulsive
behaviour. However if we try this we might again find, after a bit more interrogation, a new
shortcoming in our refined version. This dialectical way of working is a common enough method of
philosophy.
At some point in the course of such an examination we are likely to recognise three recurring
options. We can keep trying, testing and refining the answers to our questioning whether or not we
ever reach a satisfactory end. Or we can just prescribe the meaning of a term — in this case act — and
accept that this may put us at odds with some common usage. For some purposes — in the sciences for
example — such definition by convention can be very useful. Or we can content ourselves with the
ambiguities and recognise that ordinary language is adapted to several purposes and that a term
typically works as a semantic makeshift rather than a precision tool with a single purpose. 1 At his
point I will content myself with the last observation, because I have made the point that I need to make
about human actions: even if we can observe them externally or empirically, their nature as acts has a
mental component — and mental things go on in humans’ brains.
Some acts — mental acts — may be entirely hidden to all but the one who does them, inside
human’s brains: thinking, believing, desiring, hoping, wondering. 2 Sure, many have their external
signs — the thinker leans their chin on their hand and stares at nothing, the worrier frowns, the
daydreamer smiles — but a lot goes on inside a human’s head that no one else even dreams about.
Even then I would say that all experience is physical, even if we can’t properly account for it in
physical, non-mental or non-experiential terms, or in the terms of the physical sciences.
Ordinary usage recognises a taxonomy of events in which at one extreme there is the
absolutely physical — let’s say the glacier or ocean placing that large stone where Harwich would be
built — and at the other, the purely mental, the private thought of a solitary mind. Depending on your
philosophical mood you may be convinced of the priority of the non-mental world. No matter what
you or anyone else thinks, if some rock is in your foot’s way, your foot will strike it. In another mood,
an individual’s own mental experience, to which each has their own privileged and authentic access,
appears to be the only thing anyone can be certain of. Everything else is at a remove from this most
immediate and inner experience. It is the first and last of experience.
For historical inquiry however, the social predominates, and the relevant information is
typically inauthentic and uncertain. Neither subjectivity nor objectivity predominates. So I want to
avoid the problems that occupy most metaphysics, not only those of ‘out there’ materialism, but also
those that arise from the innocent enough observation that experience comes first before whatever else
there may be ‘out there’ beyond it. History is mostly about social actions, not metaphysics. Its inquiry
begins with the preponderance of intersubjectivity. We are born of others and we are born social.
I am probably taking a bit of a backward step here to the concerns of philosophy’s linguistic
turn, which is just what an awful lot of twentieth century philosophy, analytical and otherwise, did. It
wanted to avoid metaphysics too. A light metaphysical framework, built from everyday materials, has
its advantages. All I want is a bit of scaffolding to make some observations on what in any historical
inquiry we conceive of as acts or events, how and why we conceive of them as we do, and what kinds
interest us most.
Any external action is social simply by being observed to be an action. There is a kind of
interpretation in the observation. The observer observes some meaning, even if the agent had no
intention of signalling any meaning. I said before that acts have a mental as well as physical
component, and in saying so I took the purely physical or the purely mental as the analytical primitives
for classifying events. However we observe acts as thoroughly social animals, taking the social, or
meaning, as our primitive term or conceptual starting point; parsing actions into physical and mental
components is an analytical afterthought, an artefact of philosophy.
Humans are not only social animals they are communicative animals: not only do their actions
signal some kind of intention to observers, some actions are intended to signal intentions. A worrier
can sigh in order to make someone else notice that the worrier is worried. Someone who kicks a stone
might intend another to observe that there is some reason for kicking the stone. We are talking about

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animals who can be very ingenious when it comes to signalling (or concealing) intentions about
intentions, or, for that matter, intentions about intentions about intentions. The philosopher Paul Grice
drew a distinction between intention and meaning: meaning he said is a matter of ‘nesting intentions’
in other intentions. 3 And when it comes to meaning we can be quite explicit, for we are not only
communicative animals we are linguistic animals. Grice said that a speaker who says something
linguistically explicit such as ‘Johnson kicked the stone’ intends that a listener recognize that the
speaker intends to inform the listener that Johnson kicked the stone.
Spelling this out, it sounds convoluted, but we do all this intending about intending, without
having to think about it. It’s our birthright. We live as linguistic animals and we observe acts and other
events as linguistic animals, inferring their meanings in the context of a system of human intentions,
beliefs, and desires. Interpretation is like breathing. There is no observation without it. To reduce our
perceptions to the degree zero of pure physical or pure mental observation requires some effort of
abstraction, and some clumsiness. Philosophers used to analyse sense perception into a sequence of
stages like this: physical stimulation of the senses; the collection of the sense data uncorrupted as yet
by concepts; derivation from the sense data of our perception of physical things; and, if these things
are human things like actions or speech then, derivation of their intentions or meanings. 4 However our
observations are never immediately physical and our perceptions are always mediated by our organs,
our concepts and interpretation.
What we call empirical observation is the kind of observation said to be proper to the sciences.
However if we consider a scientist observing a purely physical event as the model of empirical or even
objective observation, it is easily forgotten that we are not only social animals in our production and
interpretation of actions, we are social animals when it comes to the empirical or objective observation
of even purely physical events. An empirical observer is not alone, for the condition of an empirical
observation is that two observers would observe the same event. Empirical observation is therefore an
act of observation that is itself observed, or at least observable, by another observer. In experimental
science this condition is usually satisfied by the formal condition that experimental events be
repeatable. Strictly though any event is utterly unique, and therefore none is repeatable, so scientific
repeatability can only try to repeat similar events, or as we say events of a kind. The repeatable events
of empirical science are different events that share all the salient theoretical features, but which cannot
possibly share all other features. They don’t share time and place, or occupy the same place in the
same causal framework, but they must, in their most immediate causes and effects, share similar
frameworks consisting of the same kinds of events. Empirical observation in science is thus built on
social cooperation and jeopardised by the interpretation of degrees of similarity of its ‘repeatable’
events, a situation that the protocols of conventional experimental method and scientific publication
are designed to deal with. Historical sciences like cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, ecology
and human history cannot avoid or eliminate unrepeatable events. For them observation of the same
can only be observation of the same event by different observers, it is fraught with the interpretation of
different observers, and observations can’t be checked again if they are disputed. When the event is an
action, its uniqueness and its inherent meaning place serious limitations on the reliability of empirical
observation. It is well known that, since descriptions of actions depend on interpretations of meaning,
where there are different observers’ descriptions, doubt is cast on the claim that they are descriptions
of the same event. Even if direct and repeated observation of unique events were possible, observation
of intentions would remain notoriously obscured.

Acts of speech belong to a larger class of linguistic, communicative actions. In addition to

speech acts there are written acts. What I shall call propositional acts include linguistic acts such as
speaking and writing, and also some pictorial communicative acts such as images (moving and still)
and imitative gestures. Propositional acts are about events, including those special events we call
states of affairs. Historiography consists of propositional acts, typically long-lasting propositional acts
in writing, recorded speech, cinema and video, strung out in narratives. While the ultimate object of
historical inquiry consists of acts and events of all these kinds, the primary objects of historical inquiry
are for the most part propositional acts present to the historian as documents.
Communicative acts that produce enduring and replicable forms of themselves, such as acts of
writing and video, have a special value for historical inquiry. They are acts that may be empirically
observed in the strict sense that they may be repeatedly observed. An observation of a written

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statement may be observed again and again until the written statement and all its copies perish. The
same applies to audio recordings of statements. It is important to remark here that this replication of
the act of stating is still, like scientific replication, a matter of the replication of instances of a kind:
each particular act of reading a statement is strictly a different communicative event 5 . Writing made
history possible because it made certain historical events, namely written linguistic acts, empirically
observable in the strict sense that an empirical observation is not just a sensory observation but an
observation that is itself observable.
Written statements are empirically observable in the strong sense of being repeatable, but the
events they describe are no longer empirically observable in that sense, unless those written statements
are about themselves, namely, unless they are performative 6 written acts. Performative acts state that
they are declaring, vowing, apologising or otherwise performing some specified linguistic act and in
saying so they perform that act. 7 The peculiar virtue of written or voice recorded or videoed
performatives is that they perform the very peculiar function of making the acts they describe
empirically observable. Hence the special significance of these acts both as historical actions and for
historical inquiry. Although there are filmed and videoed performatives, all actual footage has a
special empirical status: no matter what it is of, i.e. even though it is not about itself, actual footage
performs a different but similar feat to a performative by making the observation of the filmed or
videoed event empirically observable in the strong sense of being repeatable. 8
I have not bothered yet to define a distinction between act and action. For flexibility
distinctions are made in ordinary usage and for flexibility they are not always consistent. We tend to
use action rather than act when we need to imply a sense of a compound act, as in the phrases action
throughout or course of action, where the term refers to acts or actions which together form a unified
event. Such action may be undertaken by a collection of people, but most significantly its component
acts almost always take place over a period of time (in which case an action is or is like a process). So
even if an action can be described as a kind of compound event, in practice we describe it using a
narrative. Narrative, which is a kind of argument structure, 9 is indispensable to the description of
events, especially actions.
We feel the need for the word ‘action’ because acts on their own are seldom enough to carry
through their intentions, or their intentions are rudimentary, unformulated, ambiguous, or provisional
in the first place. An action can involve the formulation or the reformulation the intention of the act
that initiated it. The full expression of human teleology demands actions. Action enables both the
fulfilment of acts and the redemption of misdeeds. The moral emotions — remorse, guilt, shame,
gratitude, love and happiness — all register the historical character and the redemptive capacity of
actions. Central to the understanding of the human historical condition is the predicament of the
insufficiency of mere acts. Action is the only fully historical expression of human deeds. Perhaps we
should say that the category act is just the rudimentary or the degenerate case of the category action,
and that any event is a rudimentary narrative.
All actions are more or less indeterminate in their outcomes, and initiate processes that more
or less exceed the intentions of the doer. As they exceed such intentions they may be designated by
new descriptions and take on new identities. 10 Even if it were it possible unambiguously to identify the
intentions of the doer (such identification probably exceeds even the capacity of the doers themselves)
acts would still be indeterminate in their propensity to initiate or be absorbed into processes. So far as
the consequences of an action are ongoing and therefore the identity of the action indeterminate, the
action is the start of a process, a deliberate, teleological process if or as long as the doers or doers can
sustain it. Performatives so far as they are performed in most cases are performed as processes. A
promise made, in order to remain a promise and be a promise kept must become the start of a process.
In its upholding lies its felicity.
There are also of course processes that do not involve actions: the processes of natural history,
geological processes, biological processes. In its general sense a process is a series of related events.
Whatever events are, they are tied in to our ways of talking about the world and along with the
grammar of language we have a kind of grammar of events. We have conceptual categories which
recognise and parse our environment in ways that make us fit to interact with it. Just as we recognise
objects relevant to our survival, we recognise the variable spatial and temporal locations of objects and
it is in terms of the conceptual category of events that we accomplish this. And just as linguistic
grammar is quasi logical the related grammar of events is too, so we can infer truths about events from

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other truths about events. I have already mentioned one such feature of events, namely that any event
is unique and unrepeatable. By the grammar of events we are also, for example, able to compound two
or more events into a single larger or compound event. A process is just one usefully conceived kind
of compound event. Any collection of events can be compounded, but the events of a process bear
certain relations to one another. They are usually sequential, and they are usually related causally: they
may have the same cause, or each causes or is caused by another, or in the case of actions they may
have a common end. 11

Any history, and any philosophy of history implies a theory of events, which is to say it
assumes a theory of events, usually an unarticulated everyday theory, a ‘folk’ theory, and this theory
begins with our seldom articulated grammar of events. This is an area that has not been neglected by
philosophers, often those with an interest in ethics and action, sometimes by those interested in
philosophy of history. 12 In this context I should now consider how we identify events, how we
establish that an event you call x is the same event as the one I call y.
In the semantic makeshift of ordinary English, event can be used to refer to what happens in a
few very useful ways. One way it works is to pick out a spatial and temporal location: in that location
and during that time an object or set of objects goes through some change. Two events are the same if,
and only if, each occupies the same place and the same period of time. Such a description with its
appeal to spatiotemporal dimensions is familiar to a scientific culture, by which I mean everyday
modern scientific culture and not just specialised or high scientific culture. Another way event works
is to identify a place in a network of causes and effects. Two events are identical if, and only if, each
has the same causes and effects. In the case of actions this places events into the context of intentions.
There might be other candidates, but I think these are most important. Even if they might seem a bit
technical for ordinary English speakers, that is no reason to doubt that the term event is ordinarily used
in these ways. The study of logic or grammar may be difficult and technical, but everyone reasons
more or less logically and speaks more or less grammatically. 13 . Where analytical scrutiny comes up
with counterexamples to these criteria of identity, the counterexamples can be seen as evidence of the
occasional imperfections of the do-it-yourself use of language. However the neat dissections of
analysis can obscure a crucial feature of events in the light of which the ‘occasional imperfections’ of
language look like dazzling solutions. Events, especially acts, cannot be so easily dissected from larger
intentional, teleological and social processes.
All events and especially actions are only properly conceived and identified in the contexts of
narratives 14 and narratives can be complex, ambiguous, and digressive. And change with time. 15
Events understood in this sense can make analysis of their precise identification look so ham-fisted as
to be irrelevant. All the same, analysis is not only something analytical philosophers do. The
imperfections of analysis are themselves among the imperfections in the ordinary ways we have to talk
about what matters to us. Analysis, to paraphrase Quine, ‘is self-conscious common sense’ 16 . The
ways we identify events are mostly consistent, and indeed consistency gives them added usefulness,
because conclusions drawn from identifying them one way are transferable to contexts that rely on the
other way: two events are identical in a causal network if and only if they are identical in time and
place. Where people differ over the identity of events they can switch methods of identification to
decide the question. So if the causal descriptions of different observers are inconsistent in their
understanding of an action’s intentions or ends, we can often establish the identity of actions by
whether they share time and place. In whatever way we describe it, an event is something particular,
and on further examination we find other features of events: As I’ve mentioned, two or more events
can be combined into a single compound event; events are causally discrete; an event does not cause
any of its parts, nor does any of its parts cause an event. Despite do-it-yourself imperfections these
logical features of events are imprinted in the structure of language.

As I said, history is about events so I offer these remarks on acts and events only to make
more explicit what historians, like everyone else, assume about them. Now to take a long hard look at
an event.

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1
No less than our everyday uses, our philosophical uses of ‘intention’ differ. How acting and intending go
together is a big philosophical minefield. Not somewhere to go now.
2
Not all events are non-mental. We experience events that are mental events, but since intention has no part in
them we just refer to them as events and not acts. They happen to us; we don’t do them.
3
See among others Paul Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1989. The notion of ‘nesting intentions’ is mentioned on p. 283.
4
Back in 1960, Quine, in the beautiful opening of Word and Object (1970 [1960] The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts) surveys it all, reminding readers of its folly.
5
It is also, though, part of a single, large, compound event which is made up of all the separate readings.
6
The term performative is from the speech act theory of J.L. Austin.
7
See Writing and History
8
See History The Movie
9
See Truth and Historical Narrative
10
See A Long Hard Look At An Event, The Latham-Howard Handshake.
11
I would include states of affairs under the rubric ‘event’ because states are just sustained ongoing processes in
which change does not eventuate. Even what we call an object is, by dint of its more or less stable ongoing state,
a kind of process and therefore a kind of event.
12
See for example Judith Jarvis Thompson’s Acts and Other Events (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1979) for
an attempt to describe something of the grammar of events. See also Donald Davidson’s essays on actions and
events (see below). Arthur Danto’s Narration and Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 1985) has a
discussion of the indeterminacy or ‘boundlessness’ of actions, although the term ‘boundlessness’ comes from
Hannah Arendt’s fascinating discussion of action (among other things) in The Human Condition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, page 175ff).
13
See Donald Davidson’s essay “The Individuation of Events” in The Essential Davidson, Clarendon Press,
Oxford University Press, 90-104. See also WVO Quine’s essay ‘Events and Reification’. in Actions and Events:
Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Ernest LePore and Brian McLaughlin (editors), Basil
Blackwell, New York, 162 – 171. Quine offers a pretty critique of the logical problems of Davidson’s causal
criteria for individuating events.
14
See Truth and Historical Narrative
15
See A Long Hard Look At An Event, The Latham Howard Handshake
16
In Word and Object, 3