The Philosophical Review · 1995 · 274 citations · 0 references
Language StudiesLinguisticsPhilosophyConstitutional TheoryPhilosophy Of LanguageSyntaxCategory TheoryMass PropertiesCount Noun DistinctionsMass ConcreteMass ElementsMass Noun DistinctionsOntological PluralismSyntactic Features
The distinction between count and mass nouns is central to linguistics and philosophy, with syntactic criteria such as pluralization, numerals, determiners, and verb agreement distinguishing them, yet this syntactic grouping does not imply ontological equivalence. The study aims to investigate mass nouns that are significant for the ontology of physical objects, focusing on Tyler Burge’s concrete mass terms. The authors examine these mass nouns by analyzing their syntactic properties and philosophical implications as outlined by Burge.
The distinction between and has proven to be of considerable interest to both linguists and philosophers. There are familiar syntactic criteria for the distinction: count nouns admit of pluralization, can occur with numerals, take 'a' and 'every' in the singular and 'few' and 'many' in the plural; while mass nouns always take singular verbs, cannot occur with numerals, take determiners like 'much' and 'little' rather than 'few' and 'many', and so on. Such criteria for mass nouns put words like 'gold', 'water', 'air', 'time', 'freedom', 'happiness', etc. into the same syntactic category; but this fact is not likely to suggest to us that, for example, 'the gold in his pocket' and 'the freedom he enjoys' denote entities belonging to the same ontological category. In order to arrive at an interesting philosophical subject by way of mass terms, let us consider just those mass nouns that promise to be of importance for the ontology of physical objects-Tyler Burge's concrete mass terms:2