Chisholm did not want to define states of affairs as things that can possibly occur, since he thought that some of them could not possibly occur. So he proposed instead to say that p is a state of affairs if and only if it is possible that there is someone who accepts p. Even if it’s impossible for p to occur, it is still possible for there to be someone who accepts it. As Jaegwon Kim pointed out (Kim 1979), there is something a bit odd about the fact that Chisholm attempted to define ‘state of affairs’ at all, since this is supposed to be a fundamental item in his ontology. Furthermore, as Kim also pointed out, the definition is of questionable value, since there is considerable disagreement about the nature of the items that we “accept”. Some take them to be sentences; others may take them to be mental items of some sort.[3] Chisholmian states of affairs are presumably intended to be neither linguistic nor psychological.