I focus on three mereological principles: the Extensionality of Parthood (EP), the Uniqueness of Composition (UC), and the Extensionality of Composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nonetheless, they are closely related (and often equated) as they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum, No difference without a difference maker. And each one of them—individually or collectively—has been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten EP insofar as they are either self-defeating (...) or unsupported. In the second part I argue that they hardly undermine the tenability of EC and UC as well. (shrink)

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but non-singular logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets, we arrive at a Russellian paradox when characterizing the semantics of mass nouns. Likewise, a semantics of mass nouns based upon predicate logic (...) and mereological sums is too weak, since it cannot characterize the “intermediary” construals that sentences containing mass nouns may receive. We then develop an account where mass nouns are treated as non-singular terms, which may refer to several things at once. This semantics is faithful to the intuition that, if there are eight pieces of silverware on a table, the speaker refers to eight things at once when he says: “The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy”. We show that this account provides a satisfactory semantics for a wide range of sentences, including cases often seen as difficult, like “The gold on the table weighs seven ounces” (Bunt 1985) and “All phosphorus is either red or black” (Roeper 1983). (shrink)

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but plural logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets when characterizing their semantics, we arrive at a Russellian paradox. And if we use predicate logic and mereoogical ums, the semantics turns out (...) to be too weak. We then develop an account where mass nouns are treated as non-singular terms. This semantics is faithful to the intuition that, if there are eight pieces of silverware on a table, the speaker refers to eight things at once when he says: "The silverware that is on the table comes from Italy." We show that this account provides a satisfactory semantics for a wide range of sentences. (shrink)

Anyone who admits the existence of composite objects allows a certain kind of coincidence, coincidence of a thing with its parts. I argue here that a similar sort of coincidence, coincidence of a thing with the stuff that constitutes it, should be equally acceptable. Acknowledgement of this is enough to solve the traditional problem of the coincidence of a statue and the clay or bronze it is made of. In support of this, I offer some principles for the persistence of (...) stuff that are general, not relying on the particular features of a kind of stuff in the way that principles for the persistence for a thing would. This provides a non-arbitrary grounding for stuff that is independent of the conditions on the nature and persistence of things the stuff composes. The principles also provide a general basis for responding to other questions about coincident stuff. (shrink)

A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy.

Aristotelian notions such as matter, form and substance should be used carefully; not only is the rich tradition in their background marked by variety of interpretation, even Aristotle's own use of these concepts is far from uniform. In his different works, matter, form and substance display contents that do not always agree. There is reason for believing that in the Metaphysics Zeta the notion of form embodies essence, and that accordingly something without essence does not qualify as substance. This cannot (...) be generalized or regarded as Aristotle's standard view, however, for in the Physics there are contexts in which the form is not conceived as essence. There, “the form or shape” is the arrangement of the substance's parts, or the object's shape, in addition to either all or some of its qualities. Outside the Metaphysics, substance, too, seems to be a less distinguished entity. In the Physics, and especially in the Categories, substance is anything capable of independent existence, any particular concrete thing that is a bearer of attributes. To the extent that our modern “object” corresponds to Aristotle's primary substance, it has a similar polysemy. While in some contexts it will mean an articulated object belonging to a specific kind, in others it will denote bodies without organized structure, that is, it will have as extension the particular bits and pieces that fill the world. A similar diversity applies to matter. When understood, for example, as a chunk out of which an artist casts her statue, matter is an object, a body, itself endowed with a boundary and a multitude of properties. But matter can be much simpler than that; it can be a plain homoeomere, a mere element, or as in prime matter, may lack every actual attribute. When in my “Matter and Objecthood” I criticized Henry Laycock's views propounded in “Some Questions of Ontology” I found comparable ambiguities transposed to contemporary discourse. In the paper just cited, Laycock examines the ontic status of matter, contrasting it with objects as particular concrete things; throughout his discussion no radical distinction is made between articulated objects and unorganized bodies. In my criticism I employed ‘object’ in the same inclusive sense. (shrink)

El presenta trabajo describe y caracteriza de manera breve y concisa lo que podría ser una ontología del arte. En la primera sección se presentan las dificultades actuales, así como las nociones y preguntas principales de la ontología. En la sección segunda, se bosquejan las definiciones y caracterizaciones actuales de la ontología, se hace especial hincapié, en la ontología aplicada. En la tercera, cuarta y quinta sección se caracteriza y configura lo que podría ser una ontología del arte, se evidencian (...) sus limitaciones así́ como sus perspectivas y trazabilidad para hacer viable dicha ontología; adicionalmente se abordan los aportes del realismo anglosajón a la cuestión. El propósito de esta caracterización es hacer evidente que es plausible dar un tratamiento integral al problema de la realidad y su configuración y desarrollo en los mundos regionales, como, el mundo del arte. (shrink)

In English, some common nouns, like "cat", can be used in the singular and in the plural, while others, like "wate"r, are invariable. Moreover, nouns like "cat" can be employed with numerals like "one" and "two" and determiners like "a", "many" and "few", but neither with "much" nor "little". On the contrary, nouns like "milk" can be used with determiners like "much" and "little", but neither with "a", "one" nor "many". These two types of nouns constitute two morphosyntactic sub-classes of (...) English common nouns; cf. for instance Gillon (1992). They have been respectively called count nouns and mass nouns. In many languages, notably Romance and Germanic languages, one can similarly identify two morphosyntactic subclasses of common nouns, nouns of one class admitting singular and plural number, and nouns of the other being invariable in grammatical number. The question we want to address in this paper is one in lexical semantics: Is there anything characteristic about the meaning of a count noun? (shrink)

Here is a common view. There exist things, and there exists stuff, where roughly, ‘thing’ is a count noun, and ‘stuff’ is a mass noun. Syntactically, ‘thing’ functions as a singular referring term that takes ‘a’ and ‘every’ and is subject to pluralisation, while ‘stuff’ functions as a plural referring term that takes ‘some’ and is not subject to pluralisation. Hence there exists a thing, and some stuff. Usual versions of the common view endorse two principles about portions of stuff. (...) The first principle is that (temporal) mereological essentialism is true of portions (parcels, masses, quantities) of stuff, where mereological essentialism is the thesis that for any persisting object or portion of stuff, that object or stuff has the same parts at every time at which it exists. The second principle is that portions of stuff obey a principle of stuff composition: for any two portions of stuff P1 and P2, there exists a portion of stuff that is the fusion of P1 and P2. I argue that these two principles are inconsistent. In particular, since I am sympathetic to PSC, I argue that mereological essentialism is false of portions of stuff. (shrink)

Along with many other languages, English has a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction between mass-occurrences of nouns and their countoccurrences. As the mass-count distinction, in my view, is best drawn between occurrences of expressions, rather than expressions themselves, it becomes important that there be some rule-governed way of classifying a given noun-occurrence into mass or count. The project of classifying noun-occurrences is the topic of Section II of this paper. Section III, the remainder of the paper, concerns the semantic differences between (...) nouns in their mass-occurrences and those in their count-occurrences. As both the name view and the mixed view are, in my opinion, subject to serious difficulties discussed in Section III.1,I defend a version of the predicate view. Traditionally, nouns in their singular count-occurrences are also analyzed as playing the semantic role of a predicate. How, then, does the predicate view preserve the intuitive difference between nouns in their mass- and those in their count-occurrences? I suggest, in Section III.2, that there are different kinds of predicates: mass-predicates, e.g. ‘is hair’, singular count-predicates, e.g. ‘is a hair’, and plural count-predicates, e.g. ‘are hairs’. Mass-predicates and count-predicates, in my view, are not reducible to each other. The remainder of Section III takes a closer look at the differences and interrelations between these different kinds of predicates. Mass-predicates and count-predicates differ from each other truth-conditionally, and these truth-conditional differences turn out to have interesting implications, in particular concerning the part-whole relation and our practices of counting. But mass- and count-predicates are also related to each other through systematic entailment relations; these entailment relations are examined in Section III.4. (shrink)

Milk, sand, plastic, uranium, wood, carbon, and oil are kinds of stuff. The sand in Hawaii, the uranium in North Korea, and the oil in Iraq are portions of stuff. Not everyone believes in portions of stuff.1 Those who do are likely to agree that, whatever their more specific natures, portions of stuff can at least be identified with mereological sums of their subportions.2 It seems after all trivial that a given portion of stuff just is all of its subportions (...) combined—not by a spatiotemporal or any other substantive unifying relation, but by a mere principle of summation, a principle requiring that, if some things exist, there exists the sum, or collection, of those things. (shrink)

The phasalist solution to the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that being a statue is a phase sortal property of the piece of clay, just like being a child is a phase sortal property of a human being. Some philosophers reject this solution because it cannot account for cases where the statue seems to gain and lose parts that the piece of clay does not. I rebut this objection by arguing, contrary to the prevailing view, (...) that the piece of clay is not mereologically constant and might even be highly mereologically flexible. (shrink)

According to Michael Devitt, the primary work of a rigidity distinction for kind terms is to distinguish non-descriptional predicates from descriptional predicates. The standard conception of rigidity fails to do this work when it is extended to kind terms. Against the standard conception, Devitt defends rigid application: a predicate is a rigid applier iff, if it applies to an object in one world, it applies to that object in every world in which it exists. Devitt maintains that rigid application does (...) the job of identifying nondescriptional predicates perfectly. I argue that Devitt is wrong about this. When we examine more closely alternative theories about the identity and persistence conditions of those entities to which mass terms apply, we find no plausible theory that has the result that a term is rigid iff it is non-descriptional. (shrink)

In §54 of the Grundlagen, Frege advances an interesting proposal on how to distinguish among different sorts of concepts, only some of which he thinks can be associated with number. This paper is devoted to an analysis of the two criteria he offers, isolation and non-arbitrary division. Both criteria say something about the way in which a concept divides its extension; but they emphasize different aspects. Isolation ensures that a concept divides its extension into discrete units. I offer two construals (...) of this: isolation as discreteness, i.e. absence of overlap, between the objects to be counted; and isolation as the drawing of conceptual boundaries. Non-arbitrary division concerns the internal structure of the units we count: it makes sure that we cannot go on dividing them arbitrarily and still find more units of the kind. Non-arbitrary division focuses not only on how long something can be divided into parts of the same kind; it also speaks to the way in which these divisions are made, arbitrarily or non-arbitrarily, as well as to the compositional structure of the objects divided. (shrink)

If, as some philosophers maintain, there are no composites, we do not have to ask whether, as others hold, composition is identity. Here I argue that both groups are wrong: there are composites, and composition is not identity. I examine one argument for excluding composites from our ontology, based on their alleged causal redundancy. I give reason to think that composites are ineliminable in causal explanations of macroscopic effects. I go on to argue that the relation between composites and their (...) components is not one of identity. (shrink)

In this paper I will combat the claim that concrete matter can exist independently of objecthood. This view is a denial of the Aristotelian principles that only particular objects exist apart, and that as a condition of concreteness, matter must have acquired form. For, it propounds that matter can be concrete and general.

There is a well-known argument from Leibniz's Law for the view that coincident material things may be distinct. For given that they differ in their properties, then how can they be the same? However, many philosophers have suggested that this apparent difference in properties is the product of a linguistic illusion; there is just one thing out there, but different sorts or guises under which it may be described. I attempt to show that this ‘opacity’ defence has intolerable consequences for (...) the functioning of our language and that the original argument should therefore be allowed to stand. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est consacre a l'etude de la distinction linguistique entre noms massifs (lait, mobilier, desordre, amour...) et noms comptables (chat, equipe, combat, chose...). Les premiers sont normalement invariables, tandis que les seconds s'emploient librement au singulier et au pluriel. Apres avoir etabli qu'il s'agit bien d'une distinction morpho-syntaxique, l'ouvrage discute la possibilite de caracteriser semantiquement cette distinction. Les recherches existantes ne tiennent compte, essentiellement, que des noms s'appliquant au domaine materiel. Ce travail, au contraire, examine en detail aussi bien (...) les noms concrets qu'abstraits. Il propose de redefinir les proprietes souvent attribuees aux noms massifs (references distributive et cumulative), grace, notamment, a une nouvelle notion de partie. Concernant les noms comptables, il montre qu'aucune propriete purement semantique n'est necessaire pour qu'un nom soit de ce type. L'ouvrage se termine par l'analyse des conversions (emplois massifs des noms comptables, et vice versa), et du role qu'y jouent les facteurs pragmatiques. (shrink)

We speak of products in two senses: in one, we speak of types of products, in the other we speak of the particular objects that are instances of those types. I argue that types of products have the same ontological status as that of material stuffs, like water and gold, which have a non-particular level of existence. I also argue that the relationship between types of products and their instances is logically similar to the relation of constitution, which holds between, (...) say, gold and a ring made of gold. In my approach, types of products are concrete entities, having spatiotemporal properties. This picture fits our commonplace conception of types of products better than alternative approaches according to which types of products are universal, abstract, or mereological entities. (shrink)

Table of Formal and Descriptivists Ontologists (PDF - from Bernard Bolzano to present time) Ontologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries (a selection of critical judgments about some of the greatest philosophers of the recent past) Living Ontologists (a list of authors with an interest in ontology, with synthetic bibliographies).

Simple mass nouns are words like ‘water’, ‘furniture’ and ‘gold’. We can form complex mass noun phrases such as ‘dirty water’, ‘leaded gold’ and ‘green grass’. I do not propose to discuss the problems in giving a characterization of the words that are mass versus those that are not. For the purposes of this paper I shall make the following decrees: (a) nothing that is not a noun or noun phrase can be mass, (b) no abstract noun phrases are considered (...) mass, (c) words like ‘thing’, ‘entity’ and ‘object’ are not mass, (d) I shall not consider such words as ‘stuff’, ‘substance or ‘matter’, (e) measures on mass nouns (like ‘gallon of gasoline’, ‘blade of grass’, etc.) are not considered, (f) plurals of count terms are not considered mass. Within these limitations, we can say generally that mass noun phrases are those phrases that ‘much’ can be prefexed to, by ‘many’ cannot be prefexed to, without an0maly.l Semantically, such phrases usually have the property of collectiveness- they are true of any sum of things of which they are true ; and of divisiveness - they are true of any part (down to a certain limit) of things of which they are true. All of this, however, is only ‘generally speaking’ - I shall mostly use only the simple examples given above and ignore the problems in giving a complete characterization of mass nouns. In the paper I want to discuss some problems involved in casting English sentences containing mass nouns into some artificial language; but in order to do this we should have some anchoring framework on which to justify or reject a given proposal. The problem of finding an adequate language can be viewed as a case of translation (from English to the artificial language), where the translation relation must meet certain requirements. I shall suggest five such requirements; others could be added. (shrink)

A reply to Arda Denkel's argument that it is not possible to have matter without objects. I argue that the argument assumes that having a 'form' is being sufficient for the existence of an object, which the opponent should not be thought to grant.

In English, some common nouns, like 'dog', can combine with determiners like 'a' and 'many', but not with 'much', while other nouns, like 'water', can be used together with 'much', but not with 'a' and 'many'. These common nouns have been respectively called count nouns (CNs) and mass nouns (MNs). How do children learn to use CNs and MNs in the appropriate contexts? Gaining a better understanding of this is the goal of this paper. To do so, it is important (...) to first get clear on the nature of the distinction between CNs and MNs. Is it a grammatical distinction? Does the distinction apply to nouns, to their senses, or only to their occurrences within noun phrases (NPs)? Showing that the count-mass distinction really is grammatical and applies to nouns is the matter of my first part. Then the question occurs as to whether the distinction corresponds to a systematic difference in the sense of count and mass expressions. If it does, children's acquisition of the distinction may simply follow from their ability to learn the senses of these expressions and determiners. In a second part, I thus discuss various semantic characterizations that have been proposed, and make explicit the exceptions from which they suffer. Now, understanding the sense of an expression is interpreting it correctly as it occurs in an utterance. Formal characterizations of our interpretations help to clarify what is involved in learning and understanding these expressions. In my third part, I examine several formal characterizations with the purpose to specify what would be an adequate representation of the interpretations of mass and count nominal expressions. The understanding gained in these first three parts is used to identify what abilities are exercised by children when they acquire the count-mass distinction. The picture that emerges differs from earlier views of the acquisition in several respects. I thus describe these views and highlight the differences between them and my own proposal. In a final, fifth part, I critically examine the experimental evidence that proponents of some of the accounts of the acquisition of the count-mass distinction have cited in their favor. (shrink)

It has been suggested that there may exist languages that contain only feature-placing sentences, and hence the conceptual scheme implied by such languages is radically different from the one with which we are more familiar. Contrary to what some philosophers believe, I argue that with such languages, we may not be able to say things having approximately the force of the things we actually say, that is, to express the so-called ordinary matters merely at the expense of simplicity. For one (...) thing, in such languages not only we cannot speak of change in something, e.g., that Theaetetus grows older, but also the sense of change in the expression of change in something cannot be preserved in the feature-placing translation. (shrink)

"Matter" may be defined, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as "The substance, or the substances collectively, out of which a physical object is made or of which it consists". And while the O.E.D. is not the ultimate authority on words, nor is it, I believe, far wrong in this particular case. The definition is, as I shall argue in this paper, in substantial harmony with a tradition of some antiquity, according to which material objects do not constitute a somehow (...) 'fundamental category' for ontology; and it is in conflict with a more contemporary view which maintains precisely that they do. (shrink)