I’m still concerned with my ongoing analysis of interesting coincidences, along the guiding example of the death of Damocles; but I interrupt the main flow once more for a little piece of reflection. This time, however, it’s less of a metaphysical Fingerübung than rather some ontological handwringing. I’m just going to outline a complication, not having found what looks the best approach to it yet (nor even what the best conceptual or terminological framing might be).
1. I have been relying so far on a Davidsonian metaphysical framework which has the advantage of making few ontological assumptions: it’s parsimonious with respect to what kind of entities it claims to exist. The only type of entity (for our purposes) we really have to deal with are events: positions in the spatiotemporal grid which are interconnected in a causal nexus (stand in cause-effect relationships). Everything else is a matter of describing such events: including causal laws we might invoke to explain and predict them (in particular the laws of physics), nomic constraints (physical or otherwise; universal or local), and of course mental vocabulary (characterized by essentially involving intentionality) that allows us to redescribe them as intentional actions, thoughts or perceptions, and so on.
In the extended terminology I have introduced for dealing with interesting coincidences, events are one component of what I have called figurations, which are themselves (like lawlike regularities or action intentions) a matter of description. Events we find under a figurational description might be redescribed in purely physical vocabulary and thus brought under physical laws (for them to feature in scientific explanation); but in our phenomenon, that’s not really what we’re interested in: explanations here are only similar, in that they might invoke local nomic constraints which are not physical, but of a different (yet to investigate) sort. (That they are nomic constraints is not based on their place in a system of scientific explanation, but on their modal features: the way they remain invariant under counterfactual scenarios.) Moreover, since there seems to be a necessary psychological component here, too, it’s only to be expected that some of the vocabulary used in accounting for the phenomenon will be intentional — but I have separated this entire aspect, at least terminologically, from figurations by reserving for it the notion of a configuration (a figuration that is taken up by a subject, or possibly multiple subjects, in psychological processes).
But figurations have a further essential ingredient: the events (or at least some of them) which form the figuration stand in what I’ve called “metaphorical relationships”. Now I’ve already started to throw some doubt on that terminological choice, since it might suggest a primarily linguistic type of connection, which doesn’t seem to fit the phenomenon well: rather, the connection might lie on a conceptual level (doesn’t require formulated speech in a specific language). But it does appear to capture something in the scenarios we’ve investigated which makes it appear not entirely wrong, either. (Which is why, for the moment, I’m still running with this terminology of “metaphor”.)
And this is where a certain tension arises between the Davidsonian framework, where on the one hand we can distinguish the ontological category of events (based on their spatiotemporal position and causal interrelations) from whatever holds between them under various descriptions (physical, mental, figurational, or yet others), and on the other we have this role that “metaphorical connections” play in our phenomenon. To be sure: that such connections do not require linguistic formulation, but can be assigned to conceptual resources (which are shared in a cultural context, just as languages are) does not in itself constitute any need to start thinking whether we need a richer ontology — conceptual interconnections would still remain, on a Davidsonian account, on the level of description. But there is more to those “metaphorical connections” yet: they also seem, as I have once or twice preliminarily put it, to express one and the same fact. And this is where it gets tricky.
We can talk about facts in an innocuous manner, as simply that which is the case; or we might start thinking about them as (what is nowadays typically called, following a famous paper by Mulligan, Simons, and Smith) truth-makers: entities we need to postulate so that we can justifiably say that, say, the beliefs a subject holds in our scenario are true. In a Davidsonian account, one would hold that an ontology of events is entirely sufficient for that: there is no need to introduce, in addition, an entity type for facts (or something similar). Davidson himself routinely assigns that role to events:
I would say the same event may make “Jones apologized” and “Jones said ‘I apologize’” true [“The Individuation of Events”, AE 170].
ordinary action sentences have, in effect, an existential quantifier binding the action-variable. When we were tempted into thinking a sentence like (7) [“Amundsen flew to the North Pole in May 1926”] describes a single event we were misled: it does not describe any event at all. But if (7) is true, then there is an event that makes it true. [“The Logical Form of Action Sentences”, AE 116, 117.]
Thus Davidson is entirely content with having events play the role of truth-makers, both for beliefs and for articulated linguistic items, and is wary of introducing an ontology of facts in addition to them (see, for example, his “True to the Facts”; in TI 37-54). But our case is not so simple as the examples he discusses; and it is not entirely clear whether my preliminary formulation (that two events “express the same fact”) can be as easily accounted for while keeping the ontology slim and Davidsonian — or whether it indicates a deeper complication that might require us to rethink or extend it.
So let’s think it through carefully.
2. In the scenario where Cassandra notices the stopping of the clock, being there right when and where it occurs, we have an inventory of at least three happenings: Damocles dies at the hospital, the clock stops at his house, and Cassandra grasps that Damocles has just died. (We may or may not have to analyze this further, since having the perception of the clock and inferring the death are perhaps not a single mental event.) If this is an interesting coincidence, then a fortiori it’s a coincidence, meaning the first two events are not causally related, although of course the second and third are: the stopping of the clock causes Cassandra’s perception directly, and certainly is among the causes (albeit indirectly) for her conviction that Damocles has just died.
If Cassandra realizes, on noticing the clock has stopped, that Damocles has just died — then what is it that she grasps? She comes, in that moment, to form a belief; it’s a true belief moreover; and we might even make a case for saying that it is knowledge, although that’s a bit more dubious, since, as we have seen earlier, her justification for believing it would rely on something like an “intuition”, and that’s not perhaps so easily explicated. Whatever its precise epistemological status, what makes her belief true is that Damocles actually did just die. If we were to include facts in our ontology, then that would be the relevant fact here (although we have to be clear: it’s not the fact that Damocles is dead, as such; it’s the fact that Damocles has just died: the timing is relevant here, in part because it is what is expressed in the metaphorical connection). Otherwise (in the Davidsonian vein), we’d simply assign the role to the event.
This is where trouble begins. Although the event of the literal death can be considered to make Cassandra’s belief true, the same could not plausibly be claimed of the event of the clock stopping. Yet that event is the only thing Cassandra takes in when she forms the belief, and so it’s hard to see what the connection is between the supposed truth-maker and the belief it makes true. (Remember: there’s no causal chain here.) But of course there should be a connection, right?
Compare this: I might make an arbitrary wild guess and profess to believe, say, that it was sunny all morning yesterday in Rome; and if that was actually the case, it would make my belief true. But clearly, Cassandra’s belief is not arbitrary (or disconnected) in the same way.
Now, we could alter the example and suppose that I’m watching a TV replay of a cycling race that took place yesterday morning in Rome, and my weather belief is formed on that basis. This would be the right type of epistemic connection: the images give a good impression of the weather as it actually was, and the meta-information from the TV commentary is reliable enough to the infer time and location of what is represented. Yet Cassandra’s forming of her belief (on the basis of the metaphorical relationship) does not seem epistemically well-founded in this way, either.
To see this, let’s compare it with a version where it is: suppose Cassandra wasn’t at Damocles’ house, but at the hospital, waiting anxiously outside the operation room, when the surgeon steps out with a sombre look on his face. Similarly to our example, we could say that “at that moment, she knew that Damocles was dead”, the facial expression functioning as epistemic clue. But of course, this kind of clue is a reliable indicator (there is a sufficiently general regularity in everyday experience between situation types, emotional responses, and their non-verbal expressions), and there’s also evidently a causal chain that links the event of the death with the moment of psychological uptake when Cassandra forms her belief about it. It’s not the same in our coincidental scenario.
The metaphorical relationship between events in a figuration is not reliable in the sense that an empirical belief could credibly formed on its basis; in fact, it’s not a repeating pattern at all, but a rare circumstance; it would be highly unusual — but at the same time, it would not be dismissed because of its rarity but (if that makes at all sense) it would for that very reason serve to make a conceptual connection (what I’ve called “discovery”). The reliable regularity (everyday causal connection) in the doctor example does that, too. But that’s not the reason why it serves as epistemic clue; the reason for that is the underlying causality, plus a certain awareness of regularities the subject would have. Which are precisely the two things which don’t hold in the coincidence scenario.
Can we say that our guiding example falls “in between” the arbitrary and the epistemically reliable? I think that placing would be misleading as well. Following metaphorical connections isn’t an epistemic procedure at all here, at least not in the sense that it would be based on observable regularities and their reliability for forming beliefs based on them. Epistemic reliability seems not just not to apply, it appears an entirely wrong dimension or category here. But note that the point here is not that Cassandra shouldn’t have formed her belief: that seems fine and warranted in our scenario (in contrast to, say, the “wild guess” I made in forming my weather belief). But since she doesn’t form it on the basis of normal epistemic clues — which are precisely what has been excluded in the scenario — the justification for forming the belief has to lie elsewhere.
3. One might bite the bullet and think about this in a more complicated way. The death and Cassandra’s belief might have a diffuse set of common causes, various interconnected chains that intersected in the past, e.g. when little indicators of Damocles’ degrading health were apparent and noticed by Cassandra, though not explicitly acknowledged (merely subliminally registered). This would have added up (in Damocles’ physical condition) to the eventual crisis and death, and in parallel to Cassandra’s growing unconscious registering of the possibility (and imminence) of it. Her noticing the clock stopping would have been merely the last drop that caused the unconscious realization to break into conscious awareness.
In this way of thinking, we could largely keep the explanation causal, although of course the description involves a psychological layer (where Cassandra’s perceptions become causes for her growing unconscious realization). There is also a causal link between the event of the clock stopping (itself not caused, of course, by any of the health-related details — it’s coincidental) and Cassandra’s shock of awareness.
And yet, even this elaborate construct seems to be suffering from a gap at the precise point where the metaphorical connection comes in: it still seems mysterious how suddenly a “connection” emerges between so many (unacknowledged) details, in Cassandra’s memory, about Damocles’ health and the probability of a grave situation, and the clock’s stopping, which is unrelated unless, of course, we are willing to include a metaphorical connection of the “time runs out” kind. So we’re not much better off: we’ve enabled causal explanation everywhere in the vicinity of the crucial coincidence, but that focal point remains somehow singular, out of reach.
