Event semantics is concerned with the formal structure of sentences which appear to describe an event of some kind, e.g. ‘Brutus kills Caesar,’ or ‘My tooth fell out.’ Phenomenologists should be interested in work in this field, if they hope to rescue Husserl’s phenomenology of judgment from its narrow focus on copular judgments of the form ‘S is p.’ An adequate phenomenology of judgment must ultimately develop an account of judgments whose intentional correlates seem to be events, rather than states of affairs, since such judgments are ubiquitous. For this endeavor, existing work on the formal structure of event sentences provides a crucial foothold. However, phenomenologists cannot simply import semantic theories for their own use, without first evaluating them for phenomenological plausibility. This concern is particularly acute in the case of the widely-adopted “Davidsonian” approach, according to which the logical structure of event sentences diverges radically from natural language syntax. The Davidsonian form introduces a “covert” variable, which stands in for an event. Thus, the sentence ‘Brutus kills Caesar’ becomes, ‘There is an event e that is a killing of Caesar by Brutus.’ Such a theory, if correct, would have decisive consequences for the phenomenology of event sentences, and even of events themselves. Yet the introduction of covert variables in turn introduces—I argue—a covert intentional object, without assessing this idea for phenomenological plausibility. Building on Husserl’s phenomenology of predication, I develop a criterion for evaluating this hypothesis, and argue that the Davidsonian approach, as it stands, is phenomenologically untenable.

中文翻译：

---

事件语义：胡塞尔批判

事件语义关注似乎描述某种事件的句子的形式结构，例如“布鲁图斯杀死凯撒”或“我的牙齿掉了”。现象学家应该对这一领域的工作感兴趣，如果他们希望将胡塞尔的判断现象学从其对“S 是 p”形式的关联判断的狭隘关注中解救出来。一个恰当的判断现象学最终必须发展出一种对判断的描述，这些判断的有意关联似乎是事件，而不是事态，因为这样的判断无处不在。对于这一努力，关于事件句子形式结构的现有工作提供了一个关键的立足点。然而，现象学家不能简单地导入语义理论供他们自己使用，而不首先评估它们的现象学合理性。在广泛采用的“戴维森”方法的情况下，这种担忧尤为严重，根据该方法，事件句子的逻辑结构与自然语言句法截然不同。戴维森形式引入了一个“隐蔽”变量，它代表一个事件。因此，句子“布鲁图斯杀死凯撒”变成了“有一个事件 e 是布鲁图斯杀死凯撒”。这种理论如果正确的话，将对事件句子的现象学，甚至事件本身产生决定性的影响。然而，隐性变量的引入反过来引入了——我认为——一个隐蔽的有意对象，而没有评估这个想法的现象学合理性。在胡塞尔的预测现象学的基础上，我制定了一个评估这个假设的标准，并认为戴维森的方法，就目前而言，