Abstract
Since the publication of ‘An Analysis of Mass Terms and Amount Terms’ (hereafter ‘MT & AT’) there have appeared various criticisms of the theory it presented, as well as various alternative theories. I have little to say about many of the issues that have been raised (e.g., ‘how’ mass terms ‘divide their reference’), but I will here comment briefly on four issues that are particularly relevant to the theory proposed in MT & AT.
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Notes
T. Burge, ‘Truth and Mass Terms’, Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972), 263–82
J. Pelletier, ‘On Some Proposals for the Semantics of Mass Nouns’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 3 (1974), 87–108. Moravcsik seems to imply this in J. M. E. Moravcsik, ‘Mass Terms in English,’ in K. J. J. Hintikka, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and P. C. Suppes (eds.), Approaches to Natural Language, D. Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1973, pp. 263–85.
MT and AT, p. 376. I never said, though, that substances are abstract entities.
From R. Montague, ‘Comment on Moravcsik’s Paper’, in Hintikka, Moravcsik and Suppes, op. cit.
From R. Grandy, ‘Comment on Moravcsik’s Paper’, in Hintikka, Moravcsik and Suppes, op. cit. This was also suggested in MT and AT, footnote 42.
This may also be Quine’s view; cf. W. Quine, Word and Object, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, p. 98. Burge’s ‘fusion’ is a mereological individual in the sense of N. Goodman and H. Leonard, ‘The Calculus of Individuals and Its Uses’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 5 (1940), No. 2. However, Moravcsik’s ‘mereological individuals’ are different; cf. discussion of identity conditions in Moravcsik p. 281.
Cartwright would probably disagree with at least some parts, Moravcsik would com- plicate the treatment of adjectives, and Pelletier has reservations about my analysis of ‘Gold is the element with atomic number 79’ (Pelletier pp. 105–06). I am skipping over the issue of potential agreement or disagreement concerning what kinds of thing the predicates are true of. Footnote 17 of MT and AT contains an argument which, if good, rules out Ontological Simplification B of that paper. I now have reservations about the argument, because of the possible unclarity of application of predicates like `is blue’ to things whose surface color diverges from their interior color.
MT and AT, p. 386. Some authors have asked how the theory can provide for the equivalence of `x is water’ with `x is sm water’. The answer lies not in the canonical symbolism, but rather in the principles governing how English is to be represented therein. I would treat ‘sm’ before mass nouns just like `a’ before count nouns. There are alternatives here. The simplest device is to treat these as small-scope existential quantifiers, to treat unadorned mass nouns as containing the null determiner (this is required; cf. MT and AT p. 382), and to analyse `is’ preceding noun phrases as Then `x is water’ and `x is sm water’ both translate identically as `(3y) (yQw and x=y)’.
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Parsons, T. (1975). Afterthoughts on Mass Terms. In: Pelletier, F.J. (eds) Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems. Synthese Language Library, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4110-5_11
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