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To: jboske@yahoogroups.com From: Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@hidden.email> Subject: Link on (Intensional) Masses Cc: Bcc: Nick Nicholas <nickn@hidden.email> X-Attachments: Godehard Link. 1983. The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: A Lattice-theoretical Approach. In Baeuerle, R., C. Schwarze & A. von Stechow (eds), Meaning, Use and the Interpretation of Language. Berlin: de Gruyter. 303-23. [Link does an extensionalist approach to substance: he has a, b, the goo of a, the goo of a+b (his mu-operator below is the goo of all x:P(x)), and the collective of a+b.] Before I go on to present my own approach I want to say something about what ter Meulen calls nominal mass terms. Typical examples are stuff names like "gold" in sentences like "gold has the atomic number 79". But there is also the time-honoured sentence "water is widespread" in which the term "water" has apparently a somewhat different status. It seems to refer to the concrete "scattered invidivual" that you just find everywhere, hence Quine's analysis in terms of mereology. In this sense the sentence should be synonymous with "the water (on earth) is widespread". Of the same type is the use of "gold" in "America's gold is stored in Fort Knox." Here, again, a concrete object is referred to by "America's gold", namely the material fusion of all quantities of the US gold reserve. [In my terms, the Substance of the Collective of the Individuals of Stuff]. So there can be no doubt that some notion of fusion is needed to account for definite descriptions involving predicative mass terms (the mu-operator defined below does just this.) Genuine stuff names, however, are something else. Substances are abstract entities and cannot be defined in terms of their concrete manifestations. The question, then, is of what kind the connections are that are intuitively felt between substances and their quantities. Take water, for instance. A quantity is water if it displays the internal structure of water, that is H2O. But this relation is not a logical one. Or else we might look for substance properties which carry over to the quantities of the substance in question. Water is a liquid and yet, all concrete water might be frozen. So we have to go to dispositional properties, getting more and more involved into our knowledge of the physical world... What I am getting at is that *nominal mass terms do not seem to have a proper logic*. Be that as it may, this issue is completely independent of the lattice structure that governs the behaviour of predicative mass terms and plural expressions; it is only this structure that I want to address myself to in the present paper. [... So Link only talks about bits of stuff, in the end: extensional quantities. In fact, he only ever has "goo of thing" not "goo on its own", or even "some of the goo." His footnote has me worried:] Contributions to the problem of substance names can be found in Pelletier (1979) (in particular, Parsons (1979)), Bunt (1979), and ter Meulen (1980, 1981). Let me comment on the latter work, which is formulated in a Montague framework. The few remarks I made here will make it evident that I fully agree with ter Meulen in that nominal mass nouns cannot be *reduced* to predicative mass nouns. But for this very reason I fail to see any cogent argument for the kind of denotation ter Meulen wants to assign to these terms at a given reference point (i.e. intension functions denoting in each world the set of concrete quantities of the substance in quesion.) As it turns out, the arguments she puts forth in ter Meulen (1981) really lend support only to the first, the critical point (viz. that reduction is impossible.) But what she then goes on to call a nominal mass noun's "extensional reference to an intensional object" (viz. the intension function referred to above) seems to me both syntactically and semantically misguided. For the inevitable doubling of syntactic rules is certainly unwelcome, to begin with. But what is more, those intension functions, even when lifted to still another intensional level as ter Meulen wants to have it, are simply not well motivated as substance name denotations. The statement, for instance, that two fictional substaces can be differentiated (op. cit., p. 438) is not compatible with the principle of rigid designation introduced earlier (op. cit., p. 424). More generally, there are no rules that could justify intuitively valid inferences from contexts involving nominal mass nouns to contexts with their corresponding predicative terms --- it is my view, anyway, that such inferences are not based on pure logic alone. conclude from this that the problem of nominal mass nouns is best approached in a spirit of logical abstinence. Nominal mass nouns denote abstract entities, to be sure, and as such they are the names of individuals just like "John", "Munich", and the rest. Beyond this minimal account things become notoriously vague. [I swear to God I did not read this footnote before I said "half the water is a Kind." I *think* he's saying "Water is a Kind, and as such does not admit any extensional definition." In particular, looking for concrete bits of water in possible worlds isn't going to cut it: the reference is rather more generic than that. I think he's right. I think this is our solution. In which case, it's no coincidence that both And's Substance-Not-Just-Bits-of-Substance and my current Kind are quantified by tu'o. They *are* the same thing.] -- **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** * Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@hidden.email * University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net * "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the * circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson, * _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. * **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****