Infons and states of affairs

There has been a lot of discussion of what a state of affairs is. The major consensus is, that states of affairs are an ontological category, a fundamental kind of entity. States of affairs have been mostly ignored in the past, so they are explicitly mentioned only recently. In the beginning of the 20th century, two people have to be mentioned, who made efforts explaining the nature of states of affairs, Bertrand Russel and Ludwig Wittgenstein, mostly in the study of facts, which are states of affairs that are the case, or obtain.

In russel1, Russel writes about facts:

The first truism to which I wish to draw your attention[...]is that the world contains facts, which are what they are whatever we may choose to think about them, and that there are also beliefs, which have reference to facts, and by reference to facts are either true or false[...]. If I say ``It is raining'', what I say is true in a certain condition of weather and is false in other conditions. The condition of weather that makes my statement true (or false as the case may be), is what I should call a ``fact''.

Russel already contrasts two different things. First there are things in the world, real, existing entities, which are called facts by Russel. Then there are other entities, existing in an agents mind, that may or may not be true in reference to a certain fact and in a certain environment. Here, we will call Russel's ``facts'' states of affairs, and will refer to those entities about states of affairs, which may or may not be true or false as infons.

An example of a state of affairs may be ``John's drinking of 500 ml beer''. The appropriate infon is then something like ``John drinks 500 ml beer.'' Note, that the first sentence is not true or false, nor could ever be, but is describing an event, while the second states a belief, and could well be wrong in a certain situation, and true in another.

The most important question that arises out of the notion of states of affairs, and the most hotly debated one, is whether there are states of affairs, that are not the case. Is there a state of affairs ``Robert's drinking of 500 ml beer'', when Robert never drinks beer?

Other questions that will have to be answered in an ontological investigation of states of affairs are whether there are only basic states of affairs, or if we will acknowledge a full algebra of states of affairs, using conjunction, disjunction, quantifiers or negation. Another problem is about the completeness of states of affairs. Consider again the state of affairs ``Robert's drinking of beer''. What about the state of affairs ``Robert's drinking''? A closely related question is how states of affairs are individuated, namely what the identity conditions on states of affairs are. A lot of the discussion is closely related to the acknowledgement of possible worlds, and the theory of what possible worlds are. As we are developing a theory of situations and situoids in this thesis, we have to wait until we introduced situoids, before we can start an in depth analysis of the relation of states of affairs and possible worlds, or possible situoids. Therefore, the part of this section concerning possible worlds will be incomplete, and we will refer to other sections like 5.2.7 and 5.2.6 at some times.

The question we will discuss here are:

• What are states of affairs?
• Do non-obtaining states of affairs exist?
• How complex are states of affairs? Is there an algebra of states of affairs?
• What are the identity conditions for states of affairs?
• What are infons and what is their relation to states of affairs?
• Is there an algebra of infons?