Thiago’s ChatGPT Blog: Facts, events, and states-of-affairs

This was in a conversation where I had just asked ChatGPT to summarize the respective SEP articles on facts, events, and states of affairs.

Write an overview of the difference between facts, events, and states of affairs, given everything we have seen so far.

Here’s a compact “at-a-glance” map of the three:

1) What each one is

Events
Particular happenings/occurrents (e.g., Anita’s reaching the top). They occur (they don’t “exist” the way chairs do), typically with crisp temporal boundaries. Often treated as concrete individuals; sometimes analyzed as property-exemplifications by objects at times.
Facts
Truthmakers—instantiations that obtain and thereby make corresponding claims true (e.g., the fact that Caesar died). On the standard (Armstrong-style) view, a fact exists only if it obtains; no “non-obtaining facts.”
States of affairs (SoAs) (in the Reinach/Plantinga/Wittgenstein sense, not the Armstrongian one)
Ways the world could be: complexes involving objects and properties that exist whether or not they obtain (e.g., Socrates’ being wise may exist and fail to obtain). They are the basic bearers of modality (possible, necessary, probable).

Events → explanation & grammar
Do the work in action/explanation and natural-language semantics: adverbial modification, perception reports, plural actions, and causation are neatly modeled by quantifying over events.
Facts → truthmaking & regress-stopping
Ground truths by tying particulars to universals; aimed to stop Bradley’s regress. Identifying facts with “obtaining SoAs” collapses this direction of explanation, so the separation matters.
SoAs → modality, probability & worlds
Let us talk about possibilities and chances. Sentences that stand for the same SoA share modal status even if they express different thoughts. “Possible worlds” can be modeled as maximal non-transient SoAs.

Events: occur/happen; temporally extended or instantaneous; tolerate vague spatial boundaries.
Facts: exist iff they obtain; often taken as concrete obtaining complexes (atemporal on some views, but not required).
SoAs: exist independently of obtaining; many are time-indexed (transient vs non-transient) but the category itself is not tied to actuality.

Events: typically involve agents/patients, times, and event-kinds; identity is debated (coarse “unifiers” vs fine “multipliers”; causal, mereological, or locational criteria).
Facts: are instantiations—particulars + properties/relations tied in the obtaining way; they’re as fine-grained as the tying requires.
SoAs: involve the same kinds of constituents but need not obtain. Better seen as ontologically dependent on their objects/properties (via predicability) rather than mere tuples/wholes; this lets necessarily co-obtaining SoAs still differ.

Language & thought
- Events: help analyze verb aspect, adverbs (“stabbed Caesar with a knife”), perception reports, and plural subjects.
- Facts: fit ‘that’-clauses in factive contexts (“It’s a fact that…”), serving truthmaking rather than semantic variation.
- SoAs: also pair with ‘that’-clauses, but crucially allow non-obtaining references; too coarse-grained to be standard belief contents (Hesperus/Phosphorus), though some “object-centered” belief theories try.
Perception
- Events are the natural targets of “what was seen/heard.”
- Some accounts model veridical/illusory/hallucinatory experiences as awareness of SoAs (obtaining vs not), but this “common-factor” claim is contested.
- Facts align with the factivity of “see that…”, but don’t cover illusions.
Value
- Dispute: are facts or SoAs the final bearers of value introduced by ‘that’-clauses? One side: property-exemplifications (facts). The other: even non-obtaining SoAs (e.g., everyone’s being happy) can be intrinsically good.
Causation
- Standardly relates events (including debates on omissions/negative events). Facts/SoAs can figure in causal explanations, but events are the canonical relata.

“A fact is just an obtaining SoA.”
Tempting, but it breaks truthmaking’s asymmetry: we still need something that makes the SoA obtain.
“SoAs are just sets/tuples.”
Pure set/tuple models mishandle order, transitivity (Frege’s lava worry), timing, and fine grain. Treat SoAs instead as dependent items generated by predication.
“Events are just objects in time.”
Some four-dimensionalists say so, but many distinctions (movement, co-location, aspect) still motivate keeping the category.

Events: what happens; occurrents; central to causation and verbal aspect.
Facts: what makes truths true; obtaining instantiations; no non-obtaining cases.
States of affairs: ways things could be; exist with or without obtaining; anchor possibility, necessity, and probability.

That’s the clean division of labor—and why contemporary metaphysics often needs all three.