EXTENSIONALIST ONTOLOGY AND EVENT INDIVIDUATION: BASED ON QUINE’S LOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF HERACLITUS’S THEORY OF RIVER

Abstract

Taking Quine’s logical reconstruction of Heraclitus’s Theory of River “No one can step into the same river twice” as its starting point, this paper critically explores the potential explanatory power of Quine’s extensionalist ontology for the problem of event individuation. While Quine himself never explicitly endorsed the ontological status of event, his two criterion of ontological commitment and his criterion of spatiotemporal continuity for an entity provide a unique analytical tool for grounding event individuation. By analyzing Quine’s distinction between river (as four-dimensional spatiotemporal continuum) and river stage (as instantaneous component), this paper argues that reducing event individuation to the demarcation of spatiotemporal regions offers a way to bypass longstanding controversies in traditional event metaphysics. The diachronic identity of an event does not depend on changes in attribute (such as the
replacement of water molecules or differences in flow states), but is solely determined by the continuity of the spatiotemporal region (the integrity of the four-dimensional trajectory).1 This criterion not only addresses identity disputes arising from the confusion of entity and attribute but also provides a unified logical framework for the individuation of event. The study further points out that Quine’s theory resolves traditional metaphysical dilemmas through the
semantic ascent strategy, transforming the issue of event identity into the delineation of spatiotemporal regions at the level of linguistic logic, thereby offering a methodological paradigm for naturalistic metaphysics. The conclusion highlights that although Quine’s theory does not directly address event
ontology, his extensionalist framework, by rigorously rejecting intensional standards, provides a logically parsimonious and metaphysically lightweight alternative for event individuation. This reconstruction not only deepens the analytic philosophical interpretation of the river theory but also furnishes methodological insights for contemporary debates in event theory regarding the role of spacetime and criteria of identity.