Glüer II 94f
Predicates/Davidson: shorter formulations with less relations do not lead to significant different predicates. - Toast-Example: "Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. (1967)
(7) Jones buttered in the bathroom at midnight with a knife and deliberately a toast.
(8) Jones buttering a toast at midnight
(9) Jones is buttering a toast.
Toast Example: Shorter formulations with fewer relations do not lead to different predicates.
Toast bread Bsp/Davidson/Glüer: it is not clear why a predicate ad infinitum could not be modified: if we had to assume a change of meaning every time, we would be standing on an infinite >
lexicon.
II 95
Davidson proposes to interpret sentences like (9) as quantification of existence, and predicates like "buttertert" as three-digit, that is, with an additional event place not reflected at the surface of the sentence. Thus (9) is true precisely when
(9') (Ex)(butter(Jones,a toast, x))
if there is at least one event x, so that x is a buttering of a toast by Jones. For Davidson, propositions of action have the form of existential quantifying predications, so they are not descriptions of action in the sense that they refer as a whole to a certain event.
From such predications, however, singular terms can be formed, e.g. "the churning of the toast by Jones".((s) This is a description)
Davidson: "dated particulars" non-repeatable entities with definite spatial temporal localization. More complex ones are to be interpreted as conjunctions.
(8') (Ex)(buttered (Jones, a toast,x) and at midnight(x))
((s) Cf. nowadays >
frame theories.)
