Abstract
These are some bits and pieces on the distinction between count nouns and mass nouns in an attempt to investigate the semantic and/or ontological significance of that distinction.1 Count nouns are nouns like ‘label’, ‘fable’ and ‘table’, and mass nouns are nouns like ‘milk’ and ‘honey’ and ‘silk’ and ‘money’. My question is whether count nouns correspond to counting things and mass nouns to amassing stuff and also whether there is a corresponding ontological difference in what we talk about.
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Notes
It would be too cumbersome to mention all of my sources at the appropriate point in the text, but I am happy to acknowledge here the very important help of Jude Carlson, Helen Cartwright, Henry Laycock, Brian Loar, Jeffry Pelletier, and Haj Ross. I have also had the benefit of comments on very different ancestors of this paper read at the University of Wisconsin, Brandeis University, and a meeting of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association in Edmonton. Some of my examples also come from the seminal work of Otto Jespersen in The Philosophy of Grammar (New York, Norton Library; 1965 (first published 1924)), pp. 198–201.
I am largely in agreement with the main points in Henry Laycock’s ‘Some Questions of Ontology’, Philosophical Review 81(1972), 3–42.
See Henry Laycock’s ‘Some Questions of Ontology’, esp. pp. 30–34 and his ‘Chemistry and Individuation’, a paper read to the Canadian Philosophical Association, 6 June, 1973.
See Helen Cartwright, ‘Quantities’, Philosophical Review 79 (1970), 25–42.
See Laycock, ‘Some Questions of Ontology’, p. 18 for another statement of this view. 15 Cf. Eddy Zemach, ‘Four Ontologies’, Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 231–247, for an interesting discussion of this kind of view.
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© 1975 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Ware, R.X. (1975). Some Bits and Pieces. 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_2
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