  Although for many AI logicists, the goal of action formalisms is to illuminate an important aspect of common sense reasoning, most of their research is uninformed by an important source of insights into the common sense view of time—namely, natural language. Linguists concerned with the semantics of temporal constructions in natural language, like the AI community, have begun with ideas from philosophical logic but have discovered that these ideas need to be modified in order to deal with the phenomena. A chief discovery of the AI logicists has been the importance of actions and their relation to change. Similarly, an important discovery of the “natural language logicists” has been the importance of different kinds of events (including structured composite events) in interpreting natural language. From work such as this the idea of “natural language metaphysics” (see, for instance,  Bach 1989) has emerged. 