Kinds, Things, and Stuff: Mass Terms and Generics
Francis Jeffry Pelletier (ed.)
OUP USA (2009)
| Abstract | A generic statement is a type of generalization that is made by asserting that a "kind" has a certain property. For example we might hear that marshmallows are sweet. Here, we are talking about the "kind" marshmallow and assert that individual instances of this kind have the property of being sweet. Almost all of our common sense knowledge about the everyday world is put in terms of generic statements. What can make these generic sentences be true even when there are exceptions? A mass term is one that does not "divide its reference;" the word water is a mass term; the word dog is a count term. In a certain vicinity, one can count and identity how many dogs there are, but it doesn't make sense to do that for water--there just is water present. The philosophical literature is rife with examples concerning how a thing can be composed of a mass, such as a statue being composed of clay. Both generic statements and mass terms have led philosophers, linguists, semanticists, and logicians to search for theories to accommodate these phenomena and relationships. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume study the nature and use of generics and mass terms. Noted researchers in the psychology of language use material from the investigation of human performance and child-language learning to broaden the range of options open for formal semanticists in the construction of their theories, and to give credence to some of their earlier postulations--for instance, concerning different types of predications that are available for true generics and for the role of object recognitions in the development of count vs. mass terms. Relevant data also is described by investigating the ways children learn these sorts of linguistic items: children can learn how to sue generic statements correctly at an early age, and children are adept at individuating objects and distinguishing them from the stuff of which they are made also at an early age. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Buy the book | $58.99 direct from Amazon (22% off) Amazon page | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 9780195382891 0195382897 | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesMark Steen, The Metaphysics of Mass Expressions. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Henry Laycock (2005). 'Mass Nouns, Count Nouns and Non-Count Nouns'. In Alex Barber (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
G. Bealer (1975). Predication and Matter. Synthese 31 (3-4):493 - 508.
Nino B. Cocchiarella (2009). Mass Nouns in a Logic of Classes as Many. Journal of Philosophical Logic 38 (3):343 - 361.
Harry C. Bunt (1985). Mass Terms and Model-Theoretic Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Ariel Cohen (1999). Generics, Frequency Adverbs, and Probability. Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (3):221-253.
Andrei Cimpian, Amanda C. Brandone & Susan A. Gelman (2010). Generic Statements Require Little Evidence for Acceptance but Have Powerful Implications. Cognitive Science 34 (8):1452-1482.
Henry Laycock (2006). Words Without Objects. Clarendon Press Oxford.
Robert Fiengo (2010). Review of Francis Jeffrey Pelletier (Ed.), Kinds, Things, and Stuff: Mass Terms and Generics. [REVIEW] Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (4).
Friederike Moltmann (2004). Properties and Kinds of Tropes: New Linguistic Facts and Old Philosophical Insights. Mind 113 (449):1-41.
Henry Laycock (2011). Every Sum or Parts Which Are Water is Water. Humana Mente 19 (1):41-55.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2012-01-31Total downloads9 ( #114,230 of 549,671 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,450 of 549,671 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
