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Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems

  • Book
  • © 1979

Overview

Editors:
  1. Francis Jeffry Pelletier

    1. University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

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Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy (SLAP, volume 6)

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Table of contents (20 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
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  2. Non-Singular Reference: Some Preliminaries

    • Francis Jeffry Pelletier
    Pages 1-14

  3. Some Bits and Pieces

    • Robert X. Ware
    Pages 15-29

  4. Some Remarks about Mass Nouns and Plurality

    • Helen M. Cartwright
    Pages 31-46

  5. The Indeterminacy of Mass Predication

    • Richard Sharvy
    Pages 47-54

  6. Sharvy on Mass Predication

    • Francis Jeffry Pelletier
    Pages 55-61

  7. Four Ontologies

    • Eddy M. Zemach
    Pages 63-80

  8. On the Adequacy of a Type Ontology

    • Eddy M. Zemach
    Pages 81-87

  9. Theories of Matter

    • Henry Laycock
    Pages 89-120

  10. On the Usefulness of Quantities

    • Kathleen C. Cook
    Pages 121-135

  11. An Analysis of Mass Terms and Amount Terms

    • Terence Parsons
    Pages 137-166

  12. Afterthoughts on Mass Terms

    • Terence Parsons
    Pages 167-171

  13. The Proper Treatment of Mass Terms in English

    • Richard Montague
    Pages 173-178

  14. Amounts and Measures of Amount

    • Helen M. Cartwright
    Pages 179-198

  15. Mass Terms, Count Nouns, and Change

    • Tyler Burge
    Pages 199-218

  16. Stuff and Things

    • Richard E. Grandy
    Pages 219-225

  17. Quantity and Quantification

    • Brian F. Chellas
    Pages 227-231

  18. Sameness and Individuation

    • D. Gabbay, J. M. E. Moravcsik
    Pages 233-247

  19. Ensembles and the Formal Semantic Properties of Mass Terms

    • H. C. Bunt
    Pages 249-277

  20. Predication and Matter

    • G. Bealer
    Pages 279-294
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Keywords

About this book

I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc. , differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc. Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some' (unstressed)!, and this article cannot be used with singular count terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each', 'every', 'some', 'few', 'many'; and they use 'a(n)' as the indefinite article. They can, unlike the mass terms, take numerals as prefixes. Mass terms seem not to have a plural. Semantically, philo­ sophers have characterized count terms as denoting (classes of?) indi­ vidual objects, whereas what mass terms denote are cumulative and dissective. (That is, a mass term is supposed to be true of any sum of things (stuff) it is true of, and true of any part of anything of which it is true). Pragmatically, it seems that speakers use count terms when they wish to refer to individual objects, or when they wish to reidentify a particular already introduced into discoursc. Given a "space appropriate" to a count term C, it makes sense to ask how many C's there are in that space.

Editors and Affiliations

  • University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    Francis Jeffry Pelletier

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems

  • Editors: Francis Jeffry Pelletier

  • Series Title: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4110-5

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1979

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-90-277-0931-8Published: 31 March 1979

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-3265-3Published: 04 April 2005

  • eBook ISBN: 978-1-4020-4110-5Published: 08 November 2007

  • Series ISSN: 0924-4662

  • Series E-ISSN: 2215-034X

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIII, 305

  • Topics: Grammar, Syntax, Philosophy of Language

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