state of affairs a possibility, actuality, or impossibility of the kind expressed by a nominalization of a declarative sentence. (The declarative sentence ‘This die comes up six’ can be nominalized either through the construction ‘that this die comes up six’ or through the likes of ‘this die’s coming up six’. The resulting nominalizations might be interpreted as naming corresponding propositions or states of affairs.) States of affairs come in several varieties. Some are possible states of affairs, or possibilities. Consider the possibility of a certain die coming up six when rolled next. This possibility is a state of affairs, as is its ‘complement’ – the die’s not coming up six when rolled next. There is in addition the state of affairs which conjoins that die’s coming up six with its not coming up six. And this (contradictory) state of affairs is of course not a possibility, not a possible state of affairs. Moreover, for every actual state of affairs there is a non-actual one, its complement. For every proposition there is hence a state of affairs: possible or impossible, actual or not. Indeed some consider propositions to be states of affairs. Some take facts to be actual states of affairs, while others prefer to define them as true propositions. If propositions are states of affairs, then facts are of course both actual states of affairs and true propositions. In a very broad sense, events are just possible states of affairs; in a narrower sense they are contingent states of affairs; and in a still narrower sense they are contingent and particular states of affairs, involving just the exemplification of an nadic property by a sequence of individuals of length n. In a yet narrower sense events are only those particular and contingent states of affairs that entail change. A baseball’s remaining round throughout a certain period does not count as an event in this narrower sense but only as a state of that baseball, unlike the event of its being hit by a certain bat. See also CONDITION , PROPOSITIO. E.S.