INTRODUCTION

What is it for one thing to affect or to act on another? Examples come to mind: bending a bar of iron, moving a ball, melting wax. But there are other relationships one can have with an iron bar: one can also look at it, think about it, want it, approach it. Are not these too kinds of doing to it? We might say: even thinking about something is treating it in a certain way. Yet we should hardly admit that thought, sight, desire, and approaching affect or act on their objects. If we want to say that these are ways of treating things, then we have to say that not all cases of treating things are cases of affecting them. To put it in the formal mode: not every transitive verb ‘φ’, i.e. not every verb ‘φ’ with active and passive voices, is such that ‘x φs y’ entails ‘x acts on or affects y’. Let us call the values of ‘φ’ for which this entailment does hold, affective verbs, and those for which it does not, non-affective. Now the question of this paper is: what are the logical characteristics of affective, as opposed to non-affective, verbs? Or to put it in the material mode, using the term ‘operation’ neutrally: what are the logical characteristics of affective as opposed to non-affective operations?