Abstract
There is a distinction, well marked in English, between words and phrases with the grammatical features of a count noun, a noun regularly used with ‘many’ and ‘few’ in the plural and ‘an’ in the singular, and words and phrases with the grammar of a mass noun, a word which, among other things, lacks these features along with the contrast between plural and singular. ‘Ring’, ‘gold ring’, ‘metal’, ‘rope’, ‘rope from which he hung’ are examples of the former; examples of the latter are ‘water’, ‘metal’, ‘rusty metal’, ‘rope all over the floor’.
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Notes
Jespersen, O., The Philosophy of Grammar (1924), pp. 198f.
Quine, W. V., Word and Object (1960). Page numbers without further qualification refer to this volume.
Strawson, P. F., ‘Particular and General’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1953–54). Page numbers with (I) refer to this article.
Ibid.,In Individuals (1959) Strawson casts the distinction in terms of ‘feature universals’ and ‘sortal universals’; for present purposes I have not attempted to explicitly accommodate the shift. Page numbers with (II) refer to this later work.
Quine, W. V., review of P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality, Philosophical Review 73 (1964), p. 102.
Cartwright, H. M., ‘Heraclitus and the Bath Water’, Philosophical Review 74 (1965). Cartwright, H. M., ‘Quantities’, Philosophical Review 79 (1970).
F. J. Pelletier argues (in ‘Non-Singular Reference: Some Preliminaries’, a paper presented at the 1971 meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Divisision) that every count noun has a ‘mass sense’ from the possibility of a ‘universal grinder’: “... one introduces something into one end, the grinder chops and grinds it up into a homogeneous mass and spews it onto the floor from its other end.... Take an object corresponding to any (apparent) count noun he wishes (e.g., ‘man’), put the object in one end of the grinder and ask what is on the floor (answer: ‘There is man all over the floor’)”.
If we assume ‘man’ really has shifted in sense in Pelletier’s ‘answer’, the explanation for the shift (the grinder) is no more illuminating than Jespersen’s remarks about material mass words (and surely does not extend beyond these). Are we to suppose that men are made up of or constituted by man? Are they man on the hoof? Neither suggestion is very promising. But in any case, as R. E. Grandy points out in his comments on this paper, the possibility of giving a word a sense (and I am not convinced that the grinder story succeeds even in this) is not enough to establish that it has that sense.
See Robert X. Ware, ‘Some Bits and Pieces’ this volume, pp. 15–29, for sceptical arguments with respect to all of the lexical classes touched upon above.
Compare the oft-cited ‘(mashed) potatoes’, ‘(stewed) tomatoes’, ‘(scrambled) eggs’, etc. 1° J. J. Katz, ‘Interpretive Semantics vs. Generative Semantics’, Foundations of Language 6 (1970), 238.
This is an overstatement. Quine’s threefold lexical classification is ‘retrospective’, and in sentences ‘lamb’ has three functions: as a singular term (discussed below), as a general term (a count noun, plural or singular) and as a mass noun used as a general term (99).
R. E. Grandy, ‘Reply to Moravcsik’ in Hintikka et al., Approaches to Natural Language,D. Reidel Publ. Co., Dordrecht, 1973, p. 295. Tyler Burge, ‘Truth and Mass Terms’, Journal of Philosophy 69 (May 18, 1972).
Or perhaps not; but see, e.g., p. 139 of Word and Object.
Grandy defends this view in the paper cited in footnote 11; and Burge (p. 277) analyzes the argument in question this way.
Ignoring ‘Snow is white’ for the moment, it seems outrageous to regard ‘water’ in ‘Water is widespread’ as designating ‘the class of objects which are water’, as Grandy does. (I shall not pursue the matter here, but see ‘Quantities’, section 9 for an attack on a more conservative claim.) At the same time, I am in sympathy with Grandy’s scepticism with respect to views like that of Burge which invoke the apparatus of the calculus of individuals (Henry Leonard and Nelson Goodman, ‘The Calculus of Individuals and Ite Uses’, Journal of Symbolic Logic 5,No. 2 (1940) or Lesniewski’s mereology (A. Tarski, ‘Foundations of the Geometry of Solids’, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics,J. H. Woodger, trans. 1956) in order to specify what is designated in such cases. There is, I think, a ‘natural’ mereology for a given set of quantities of, e.g., water in the sense of ‘quantity of -’, as I have elsewhere tried to explain. But this claim is intended to be open to debate - i.e., it depends on an independent specification of any such set.
V. C. Chappell gives some arguments in support of Strawson on this point in ‘Stuff and Things’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 71 (1970–71), pp. 67–68. T. Parsons in ‘An Analysis of Mass Terms and Amount Terms’, Foundations of Language 5 (1970) argues in the other direction that “even if all and only furniture were composed of wood, it would not follow that wood = furniture, since parts of chairs might be wood without being furniture”. We are to suppose that under the circumstances described, we have a single Goodman-individual though not, Parsons argues, a single object designated by ‘wood’ and ‘furniture’. But the argument seems to be invalid. If as singular terms ‘wood’ and ‘furniture’ designate the same Goodman-individual, then their parts are identical in some sense of ‘part’ appropriate to the calcules of individuals. But all that follows from ‘Some parts of chairs are wood and not furniture’ is that, in Quine’s terms, the general term ‘furniture’ is not true of every part of the object designated by the singular term ‘furniture’, as he notices (99), and some such parts are wood. Parsons needs a principle according to which something is a part of F only if it is F; and any such principle appears to beg the question against Quine. I find the appropriate uses of ‘part’ especially obscure in application to (the world’s) wood, furniture, water. But perhaps the argument I’ve given is open to a parallel objection.
I.e., we need not suppose that ‘benighted persons can in this sense even hunt unicorns’, Quine contrasts this sentence with ‘Tabby eats mice’ in which opacity is not the point; and I cite the cases below (and the transparent use of ‘hunt’) just because they are not obviously open to an interpretation like “Tabby is regularly disposed to eat mice given certain favorable and not exceptional conditions” (134). But Quine’s emphasis on the fact that “... there is no simple correlation between outward forms of ordinary affirmations and the existences implied,” (242) — where opacity need not be involved — is enough for present purposes, given that immodified plurals and mass noun constructions are susceptible of uniform treatment.
Reverting to the view suggested in Section (6), one might say there is a certain kind of creature Tabby is disposed to eat; there are various kinds of things or stuff which Ernest and John breed or produce or grow. As a singular term in an opaque construction ‘lions’ (or ‘gold’) is no more problematic than ‘the Holy Grail’. Strawson’s ‘Snow is falling’ can be added to (1) and ‘Leaves are falling’ to (2) on this view. But the present suggestion — that we are dealing with something less than a singular term — is in any case intended to apply to all such cases.
A lion is a carnivore’ (‘Man is a carnivore’) says no more nor less I think than ‘Lions (men) are carnivores’, though it invites a reading, not explicitly discussed above, according to which something is claimed to be true of lions in general, or typically, or ‘by nature’. The superfluous use of ‘some’ I intend is unstressed and does not regularly occur with singular count nouns. Its significance has been a matter of dispute, and in ‘Heraclitus and the Bath Water’, Section (3), the claim that ‘some’ gives rise to an ambiguity resolved by stress (the ambiguity of Quine’s ‘some apple’), is defended at length.
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Cartwright, H.M. (1975). Some Remarks about Mass Nouns and Plurality. 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_3
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