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Mass Expressions

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Handbook of Philosophical Logic

Part of the book series: Handbook of Philosophical Logic ((HALO,volume 10))

Abstract

Problems associated with mass expressions1 can be divided into the following general areas:

  1. 1.

    distinguishing a class of mass expressions;

  2. 2.

    describing the syntax of this class;

  3. 3.

    describing the formal semantics of this class;

  4. 4.

    explicating the ontology such a class of expressions presupposes, and

  5. 5.

    accounting for various epistemological issues involving our perception of the ontology.

In our light revision of the 1989 version of this article we have added short discussions of some work from before 1989 that we had inadvertetly omitted. We have also included short discussions of work done since that time. These new works have greatly expanded the understanding of the semantics of the notion of mass; and to adequately capture their contributions would require a much more thorough rewriting of this survey than we are able to undertake. Instead, we have interspersed our comments on these contributions at various places in the text, even when there is a mismatch between our old criticisms of previous theories and the relevance of those criticisms to the new accounts. Additionally, we have included a new section at the end, which gives some directions to literature outside of formal semantics in which the notion of mass has been employed. We looked at work on mass expressions in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics here, and we discussed some research in the history of philosophy and in metaphysics that makes use of the notion of mass.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Alberta, Canada

    Francis Jeffry Pelletier

  2. University of Rochester, USA

    Lenhart K. Schubert

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    D. M. Gabbay

  2. Centrum für Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

    F. Guenthner

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Pelletier, F.J., Schubert, L.K. (2003). Mass Expressions. In: Gabbay, D.M., Guenthner, F. (eds) Handbook of Philosophical Logic. Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4524-6_6

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