Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems (Synthese Language Library Texts and Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy)

Francis Jeffrey Pelletier [ed]

ISBN 10: 9027709319 / ISBN 13: 9789027709318

Published by D. Reidel Publishing, 1979

About this Item

Minor shelf wear to brown cloth hardcover. Dust jacket has some edge wear and chipping. Otherwise a tight, unmarked book. Index. xiii, 303 pp.

Seller Inventory # 045700

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems (Synthese Language Library Texts and Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy)
• Publisher: D. Reidel Publishing
• Publication Date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027709319
• ISBN 13: 9789027709318
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

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.