One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is an attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of this book is that being is always 'being with', that 'I' is not prior to 'we', that existence is essentially co-existence. He thinks this being together, not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a (...) mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the 'I' and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a 'society of spectacle' nor via some form of 'authenticity'. (shrink)

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to “Being Singular Plural.” One of the strongest strands in Nancy’s philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book (...) is that being is always “being with,” that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this “being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the “I” and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a “society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity. The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of “Being Singular Plural” into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay “Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns. As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the “other” and “self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche’s doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” Descartes’s “cogito,” and the nature of language and meaning. (shrink)

According to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological (...) and ontological foundations. Unfortunately, these two research trends have often not communicated systematically enough to understand the specific ontology of collective aims. It is still unclear whether some irreducible social goods exist and how the answer to this question can set up a consistent understanding of cooperative actions. This dissertation addresses this issue, drawing on philosophical investigations about collective intentionality. It claims that a coherent ontological taxonomy of irreducible and reducible social goods is theoretically viable and can reframe prevailing approaches to collective action dilemmas influenced by the traditional economic categorisation of goods. The research begins by analysing how the influential theory of public goods has paved the way for some social and moral impasses. Furthermore, some theoretical proposals suggesting the existence of relational goods and common-pool resources are scrutinised. Hence, a refutation of the ontological reduction of all social goods to individual ones is developed, arguing that a specific form of cooperation, grounded in we-intentions and we-reasoning, shows the plausibility of the existence of some kinds of irreducible collective goods. Expanding on that view, a refinement of this categorisation of social goods is put forward by underlying the function of some relational entities, such as trust and shared sensemaking processes, in making cooperation robust in uncertain environments. Finally, by applying the taxonomy to collective action gridlocks regarding climate change, digital information, and public education, the consistency of this hypothesis is tested, showing that a pluralistic ontological account of social goods might improve the moral understanding of current social dilemmas. (shrink)

Under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the theme of absolute alterity still dominates the thinking of the ethical in Continental philosophy. This article examines an alternative ethical démarche, Jean-Luc Nancy's ‘singular plurality’, which refuses to start with the opposition of same and other, arguing instead for a primacy of relation, the ‘in-common’ and the ‘with’. The article first distinguishes Nancy's ‘singular plural’ from other recent attempts to disengage ethical thinking from the Levinasian framework, before (...) showing how Nancy proceeds otherwise than in terms of sameness and alterity while still maintaining an ethical impetus. Foregrounding what is politically and philosophically at stake in the difference between Nancy and the Levinasian/Derridean model, the article concludes by considering how Nancy can be defended against critics who mistakenly argue that he discounts alterity. (shrink)

I explore the possibility that the feminine, like art, can be thought in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the singular plural. In Les Muses, Nancy claims that art provides for the rethinking of a technë not ruled by instrumentality. Specifically, in rethinking aesthetics in terms of the debates laid out by Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, he resituates the ontological in terms of the specificity of the techniques of each particular artwork; each artwork establishes relations particular to its (...) world or worlds. What is at stake in the singular plural is the multiplicity of relations that are lost in the unifying gestures that arise out of radical oppositions. I rethink the singular plural through a phenomenological encounter with Barb Hunt’s artwork, Antipersonnel, a collection of hand-knitted replicas of antipersonnel landmines. (shrink)

In recent decades, plural logic has established itself as a well-respected member of the extensions of first-order classical logic. In the present paper, I draw attention to the fact that among the examples that are commonly given in order to motivate the need for this new logical system, there are some in which the elements of the plurality in question are internally singularized (e.g. ‘Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica’), while in others they are not (e.g. ‘Some philosophers wrote (...) Principia Mathematica’). Then, building on previous work, I point to a subsystem of plural logic in which inferences concerning examples of the first type can be adequately dealt with. I notice that such a subsystem (here called ‘discrete plural logic’) is in reality a mere variant of first-order logic as standardly formulated, and highlight the fact that it is axiomatizable while full plural logic is not. Finally, I urge that greater attention be paid to discrete plural logic and that discrete plurals are not used in order to motivate the introduction of full-fledged plural logic—or, at least, not without remarking that they can also be adequately dealt with in a considerably simpler system. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the implications of Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of the subject for educational philosophy by connecting his re-interpretation of Descartes to his later thinking on what he names the ontological singular plural. Nancy’s re-imagining of the Cogito coalesces around the figure of the mouth through which the subject enunciates itself within the world. Reading this extension of the ego through the mouth as an enunciation of ontological singular plurality exposes a speaking subject that communicates (...) via a sharing of its own being with other singular subjects. The article concludes that Nancy’s singular plural holds potential for affirming a substance-less subjectivity that can nevertheless serve as a locus of meaning in the classroom. (shrink)

At the opening of the first volume of his Deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy argues that “The much discussed ‘return of the religious,’ which denotes a real phenomenon, deserves no more attention than any other ‘return’” (1). This statement may seem paradoxical in light of Nancy’s extensive study of the logic of the return – including, of the divine – in texts such as “Of Divine Places,” Noli me tangere, Dis-Enclosure and Adoration. Nancy does pay considerable attention to something that, according (...) to him, deserves none. In this paper, I examine Nancy’s critique of the “return of religion” in detail and argue that it would be a mistake to assume that Nancy’s understanding of the logic of the “return” is limited to the – largely uninteresting and even dangerous, indeed – return of the Same, just as it is a mistake to assume that the phenomenon known as the “return of religion” merely consists of the dialectical resurgence of a past religious fervour, a step backwards in history. According to Nancy, religion today returns in a way that radically breaks with the logic of the return of the Same and testifies to an eternal return of difference which, paraphrasing Nancy, opens religion to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth. It does, therefore, deserve our attention, yet only insofar as, paraphrasing Nancy, it opens religion to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth (Dis-Enclosure 1), thereby providing us with new resources to think religion in the singular-plural today. (shrink)

During October 1953, Hannah Arendt made a short list, divided into two columns, which represents what she sought to move away from, singularity, and what she was moving towards, plurality. The purpose of the present contribution is to interpret her concept of the duality of the two-in-one as a middle term which opens up an ambiguous field that can either facilitate the movement towards plurality and human worldliness or turn the human soul towards itself, withdrawing it from the world. Exemplified (...) by such phenomena as thinking and friendship, the duality of the two-in-one will prove to be precisely as double and dual as its name indicates. Despite Arendt’s scepticism about the capacity of thinking and friendship to bring about a common, plural world, it will be argued, in a critical discussion of her views, that she needs and treasures both phenomena enough to give them a significant role to play in the movement towards plurality. (shrink)

Bringing together diverse theoretical and empirical contributions from the fields of social and cognitive psychology, philosophy, and science education, this volume explores representational pluralism as a phenomenon characteristic of human cognition. Building on these disciplines' shared interest in understanding human thought, perception, and conceptual change, the volume illustrates how representational plurality can be conducive to research and practice in varied fields. Particular care is taken to emphasize points of convergence and the value of sharing discourses, models, justifications, and theories of (...) pluralism across disciplines. The editors give ample space for philosophers, cognitive scientists and educators to explicate the history and current status of representational pluralism in their own disciplines. Using multiple forms of research from the relational perspective, this volume will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers with an interest in cognitive psychology, as well as educational psychology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states, arguing that it can be understood exhaustively in terms of the agency of individuals and concepts constructed out of materials that are already at play in our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism. The book provides a new account of the logical form of grammatically singular group action sentences (e.g. 'Company laid off 10,000 workers'), (...) and features new analyses of the concepts of a constitutive rule, status function, status role, collective acceptance, and proxy agency. He also provides an analysis of the structure of corporate action, including the status of corporations as legal persons, and of the nature of state action in relation to its citizens. This is the companion volume to From Individual to Plural Agency (OUP 2016), extending the multiple-agents account of collective action set out in the earlier volume. (shrink)

When viewed as the most comprehensive theory of collections, set theory leaves no room for classes. But the vocabulary of classes, it is argued, provides us with compact and, sometimes, irreplaceable formulations of largecardinal hypotheses that are prominent in much very important and very interesting work in set theory. Fortunately, George Boolos has persuasively argued that plural quantification over the universe of all sets need not commit us to classes. This paper suggests that we retain the vocabulary of classes, (...) but explain that what appears to be singular reference to classes is, in fact, covert plural reference to sets. (shrink)

In this essay, I focus on the community of thinking between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The relationship between those two thinkers is far from unambiguous: if they can be said to be thinking together, it certainly does not simply mean that they think the same thing or that they think it in the same way. I show that, because of its insistence on separation, Derrida's thinking is still a thinking of the one and the other and retains a Levinasian (...) flavour that is absent from Nancy's. Nancy's thinking insists on plurality, on the 'explosion of presence in the manifold of its partition'. It insists, in other words, on the world. If Nancy prefers the fabric of the world to the Other, it is because it only allows one to think a plurality that doesn't sacrifice the gift that each singularity is. (shrink)

I expose facets of Nancy's notion of being singular plural. Nancy's political ontology overcomes the metaphysical dualism of theory and practice by thinking the space of the between as primary. Nancy's treatment of the event of creation and the presence of the divine rethink meta-physical notions of origin and God in a way that emphasizes the parting of unity and the plurality of the world. Nancy thinks the everyday and the existential together by affirming the importance of (...) curiosity and wonder in the face of what is. Nancy offers an ontology of space (being-with) that uncovers what it means to be in touch as a way of being. (shrink)

Ordinary English contains different forms of quantification over objects. In addition to the usual singular quantification, as in 'There is an apple on the table', there is plural quantification, as in 'There are some apples on the table'. Ever since Frege, formal logic has favored the two singular quantifiers ∀x and ∃x over their plural counterparts ∀xx and ∃xx (to be read as for any things xx and there are some things xx). But in recent decades (...) it has been argued that we have good reason to admit among our primitive logical notions also the plural quantifiers ∀xx and ∃xx. More controversially, it has been argued that the resulting formal system with plural as well as singular quantification qualifies as ‘pure logic’; in particular, that it is universally applicable, ontologically innocent, and perfectly well understood. In addition to being interesting in its own right, this thesis will, if correct, make plural quantification available as an innocent but extremely powerful tool in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophical logic. For instance, George Boolos has used plural quantification to interpret monadic second-order logic and has argued on this basis that monadic second-order logic qualifies as “pure logic.” Plural quantification has also been used in attempts to defend logicist ideas, to account for set theory, and to eliminate ontological commitments to mathematical objects and complex objects. (shrink)

Offering a Canadian perspective on the emotional health of servicemen and women, Military Operations and the Mind brings together researchers and practitioners from across the country to consider the impact that ethical issues have on the well-being of those who serve. Stemming from an initiative to enhance the lives of serving members by providing them with the best education and training in military ethics before and after deployments, this volume will better inform politics and public policies and enhance the (...) welfare of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women who serve in singular, often harsh, and sometimes dangerous conditions. By integrating into the analysis the critical issue of well-being, this emerging field demonstrates a more holistic approach and is distinct from other fields in military, historical, philosophical, and behavioural studies. The first study of its kind, Military Operations and the Mind presents a new and helpful way to focus on the life of soldiers not only in operations overseas, but also once they return home. (shrink)

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean “John does not own more than one dog”, but rather “John does not own a dog”. A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the ‘more than one’ meaning of (...) the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert ‘more than one’, but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The ‘more than one’ meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy). (shrink)

It has been claimed in the literature that collective intentionality and group attitudes presuppose some “sense of ‘us’” among the participants (other labels sometimes used are “sense of community,” “communal awareness,” “shared point of view,” or “we-perspective”). While this seems plausible enough on an intuitive level, little attention has been paid so far to the question of what the nature and role of this mysterious “sense of ‘us’” might be. This paper states (and argues for) the following five claims: (1) (...) it is neither the case that the sense in question has the community (or “us”) in its content or as its object nor does the attitude in question presuppose a preexistent community (or “us”) as its subject. (2) The “sense of ‘us’” is plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (3) Plural pre-reflective self-awareness plays the same role in the constitution of a common mind that singular pre-reflective self-awareness plays in the individual mind. (4) The most important conceptions of plural subjects, collective persons, or group agents in the current literature fail to recognize the nature and role of plural self-awareness, and therefore fall short in important respects. (5) In spite of the striking similarities between the plural and the singular mind, there are important differences to consider. The authority of the singular first person point of view has no equivalent in the plural case. (shrink)

Plural identity—the relation of identity between some things xx and some things yy—has been standardly defined in terms of the plural relation one of (or among). This paper challenges that standard view. To that end, it will be argued, first, that the identity relation, singular or plural, can only be defined in a higher-order language, second, that the standard definition of plural identity in terms of the one of (or among) relation should be regarded instead (...) as providing a criterion of identity for pluralities of some particular kind, and third, that there are pluralities of another kind with which a different criterion of identity is associated. The upshot will be that plural identity as standardly defined cannot be the plural counterpart of singular identity. (shrink)

ASL can express plurals by repeating a noun, in an unpunctuated fashion, in different parts of signing space. We argue that this construction may come with a rich iconic component: the geometric arrangement of the repetitions provides information about the arrangement of the denoted plurality; in addition, the number and speed of the repetitions provide information about the size of the denoted plurality. Interestingly, the shape of the repetitions may introduce a new singular discourse referent when a vertex can (...) be inferred to denote a singular object. Thus one may point towards the first or last iteration of a horizontal repetition of BOOK to denote the left- or right-edge of the corresponding row. This yields a remarkable interaction between iconic semantics and standard logical semantics. We show that our analysis extends to ‘punctuated’ repetitions, which involve clearly individuated iterations of a singular noun. While these may initially look like coordinated indefinites, they are better handled by the same iconic framework as plural, unpunctuated repetitions. Some repetition-based mass terms also give rise to iconic effects, and to different readings depending on whether the repetition is continuous, unpunctuated, or punctuated. Our analysis highlights the need for a formal semantics with iconicity to study the integration of such iconic and logical conditions. It also raises a question: can similar facts be found in spoken language when gestures are taken into account? We suggest that several effects can be replicated, especially when one considers examples involving ‘pro-speech gestures’. (shrink)

Extension of the logical language to deliver plural reference and the logical relations that constitute knowledge of the singular and plural acquires empirical bite just in case it conforms with increasing precision to the syntax of the natural language and affords explanation of what speakers know about the distribution and meaning of plural expressions in their language. As for the syntax of natural language, this discussion, being none too precise, is guided throughout by just two (...) considerations and their immediate consequences, which is discussed at greater length in this article. The first, morpheme univocality, is that a morpheme despite its various syntactic and morphological contexts has a single meaning that supports all its occurrences. (shrink)

A plural referring expression (‘the Fs’ or ‘Tom, Dick and Harriet’) may be used to refer either distributively, saying something which applies to each of the Fs individually, or collectively, to the Fs taken as a single totality. Predicate Logic has to analyse both uses in terms of singular reference, treating them quite differently in so doing; but we think of such an expression as functioning in basically the same way in both kinds of use. This understanding can (...) be vindicated if we recognise that what a plural referring expression picks out is not either an aggregate simpliciter or a set, but a plurality– an aggregate taken relative to a principle for individuating its constituents; this admits of being seen either as many things or as one. In any given case, it is the nature of what is being said about the plurality which tells us whether the reference to it is to be taken as distributive, collective, or a combination of the two. Talk about pluralities is extensional. Augmenting Predicate Logic to accommodate the distinctive inference‐pattern associated with distributive plural reference is simple – and arguably necessary, to cope with cases in which distributive and collective reference are essentially combined (e.g., attributions of concerted action). (shrink)

It is well-known that in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl puts forth a theory of intersubjectivity. Most commentators of Husserl have read his Cartesian Meditations as presenting a theory of intersubjectivity whose basis is empathy, in the form of a process of constituting the sense of “other” in one’s own experience, as the primary origin of the intersubjective layer of experience. In this paper, I claim that the structure of intersubjectivity as Husserl presents it in the Cartesian Meditations (...) is articulated as being governed by a logic of parts and wholes rather than that of a phenomenology of empathy, and that the articulation of this logic demonstrates that the transcendental ego is intrinsically intersubjective. My main philosophical claim in this regard is that the way Husserl’s account of transcendental empathy unfolds in the Cartesian Meditations implies a prior fundamental mereological structure of which the individual transcendental ego is only a part. That is, the transcendental ego has an eidetic a-priori intersubjective structure, in the sense of being a moment of an intersubjectively structured transcendental whole. In this sense, rather than being a singulare tantum, it is more fitting to say that transcendental subjectivity is actually a plurale tantum. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Heidegger affirms that being-with or Mitsein is an essential constitution of Dasein but he does not submit this existential to the same rigorous analyses as other existentials. In this essay, Jean-Luc Nancy points to the different places where Heidegger erased the possibility of thinking an essential with that he himself opened. This erasure is due, according to Nancy, to the subordination of Mitsein to a thinking of the proper and the improper. The polarization of (...) Being-with between an improper face, the Anyone, and a proper one, the people, which is also, as Nancy shows, a polarization between everydayness and historicity, between a being-together in exteriority (indifference and anonymity) and a being-together in interiority (union through destiny), between a solitary dying and the sacrificial death in combat, leaves the essential with unthought. This essay shows not only the tensions that arise out of Heidegger’s own analyses of Mitsein and affect the whole of Being and Time but also underlines in the end a “shortfall in thinking” inherent not only to Heidegger’s work but, as Nancy claims, to our Western tradition, a shortfall which Nancy has attempted to remedy in his Being Singular Plural. (shrink)

In recent literature on plurals the claim has often been made that the move from singular to plural expressions can be iterated, generating what are occasionally called higher-level plurals or superplurals, often correlated with superplural predicates. I argue that the idea that the singular-to-plural move can be iterated is questionable. I then show that the examples and arguments intended to establish that some expressions of natural language are in some sense higher-level plurals fail. Next, I argue (...) that these and some other expressions should instead be classified as plurals whose reference is articulated, an idea explained and elaborated in the paper. I also show that the related categories of plural and superplural predicates collapse to that of ordinary predicates. In the process we also see that the law of substitutivity salva veritate should be elaborated for cases involving expressions more complex than singular ones. (shrink)

Despite the problematic political positions he adopted during his life span, the work of Carl Schmitt contains a fascinating argument in favour of `the political', which is understood as a plural symbolic space composed of friends and enemies who reciprocally recognise each other. Schmitt's struggle for the political is a struggle for a public spirit which accounts for this plurality. One of the terrains on which Schmitt wages this struggle is that of historical meaning. The image of history is (...) crucial for the political, as it is one level on which the relation between enemies is symbolised. In this paper, Schmitt's polemic for a political conception of history, which gives the enemy and the defeated their due place as political subjects, will be reconstructed. Central to Schmitt's endeavour is the attempt to think historical singularity, against the notion of repetition in history, against the understanding of history as a reservoir of `lessons' and against ideologies of progress. Through his polemic, a profane and sober image of history appears which stresses singularity, relative contingency and openness, and the pluralisation of social temporalities. The enigmatic notion of the katechon will play a crucial role in providing a very minimal but crucial form of historical meaning for such a political conception of history. (shrink)

We present a plural logic that is as expressively strong as it can be without sacrificing axiomatisability, axiomatise it, and use it to chart the expressive limits set by axiomatisability. To the standard apparatus of quantification using singular variables our object-language adds plural variables, a predicate expressing inclusion (is/are/is one of/are among), and a plural definite description operator. Axiomatisability demands that plural variables only occur free, but they have a surprisingly important role. Plural description (...) is not eliminable in favour of quantification; on the contrary, quantification is definable in terms of it. Predicates and functors (function signs) can take plural as well as singular terms as arguments, and both many-valued and single-valued functions are expressible. The system accommodates collective as well as distributive predicates, and the condition for a predicate to be distributive is definable within it; similarly for functors. An essential part of the project is to demonstrate the soundness and completeness of the calculus with respect to a semantics that does without set-theoretic domains and in which the use of settheoretic extensions of predicates and functors is replaced by the sui generis relations and functions for which the extensions were at best artificial surrogates. Our metalanguage is designed to solve the difficulties involved in talking plurally about individuals and about the semantic values of plural items. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition is frequently read as offering a “theory” of what it means to be human. But the bite of Arendt’s book is to think through the transformation of the human condition in the modern age. She argues that the rise of a scientific worldview fundamentally alters the earthly and worldly conditions in which human beings live. Since humans are conditioned beings, the change from our pre-modern subjection to fate to our modern human capacity to create a (...) humanly built world threatens a fundamental shift in human being. The transformation Arendt describes is the loss of our human plurality to a technological singularity. She argues, however, that we can choose to hold on to our humanity if we persist in thinking, and thus preserve our human spontaneity and freedom. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition is frequently read as offering a “theory” of what it means to be human. But the bite of Arendt’s book is to think through the transformation of the human condition in the modern age. She argues that the rise of a scientific worldview fundamentally alters the earthly and worldly conditions in which human beings live. Since humans are conditioned beings, the change from our pre-modern subjection to fate to our modern human capacity to create a (...) humanly built world threatens a fundamental shift in human being. The transformation Arendt describes is the loss of our human plurality to a technological singularity. She argues, however, that we can choose to hold on to our humanity if we persist in thinking, and thus preserve our human spontaneity and freedom. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a unified semantics for singular and plural superlative expressions that makes use of the ‘**’ (“double star”) distributivity operator (an operator whose role is to pluralize 2-place predicates). The analysis aims to solve two problems: (a) the distributivity problem (the fact that a superlative expression doesn’t distribute over the atomic parts of the plural individual it is predicated of); and (b) the cut-off problem (the fact that a plural superlative expression cannot (...) simultaneously be predicated of two distinct yet overlapping plural individuals). We argue that any solution to these problems that posits two distinct superlative morphemes, one corresponding to a superlative operator for singular individuals and one corresponding to a superlative operator for plural individuals, is challenged by the lack of cross-linguistic morphological evidence. We provide a unified analysis, and account for the differences between plural and singular superlative expressions by appealing to pragmatic principles. (shrink)

There can be few other uses in the Latin language which afford us so great an insight into the mental attitude of a writer at the moment of his writing, or which endow writing with so much of that personal colour which the voice alone gives in perfection, as does the singular use of the pronoun nos. All forms of this word which occur in the speeches of individuals, who are at the moment speaking independently, are either wholly (...) class='Hi'>singular uses, or partly plural uses with more or less justification for the plural form according to the extent to which the speaker is identifying himself with his surroundings. Thus we find all degrees of plurality in such forms, and it is those instances in which the plural form can be least definitely justified which we call ‘singular’ or ‘unreal plural’ uses, and which prove to be the most fascinating from a psychological point of view. The object of the present essay is to inquire how far the varieties of meaning in the singular use of nos, which Professor R. S. Conway has pointed out in Cicero, appear also in Vergil. (shrink)

In both editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, and in the Prolegomena, the table of the logical functions of the understanding in judgments lists under “quantity of judgments”: universal, particular, and singular; and the table of categories lists under “categories of quantity”: unity, plurality, and totality. As Kant regarded the forms of judgments as giving “the clue” to the derivation of categories and held that the two lists are “in complete agreement”, one would conclude from the tables that (...) the category of unity is derived from the universal form of judgment and the category of totality from the singular form. But this view of the derivations seems wrong. As a universal judgment pertains to all objects of a given sort and a singular judgment pertains to but one object, one would expect unity to be derived from the singular and totality from the universal form of judgment. That this second view of the derivations is what Kant really intended seems confirmed by the fact that at several places in his writings, including a passage in the Critique and one in the Prolegomena, when he is speaking of quantitative determinations, he explicitly associates the singular judgment with unity. But if this second view is what he intended, one wonders why he failed to correct the order in the tables in the Prolegomena and in the second edition of the Critique. Is this failure merely, as Jonathan Bennett has suggested, “a slip”? (shrink)

The fourth-century thinker and theologian Gregory of Nyssa was a convinced realist about universals. According to him, there is just one substance man for all the individuals of the species man and this universal substance is completely instantiated by each individual. In two of his treatises – the Ad Ablabium and the Ad Graecos – he draws linguistic consequences from this realist position. This enquiry results in the thesis according to which it is incorrect to use natural kind terms in (...) the plural form, because that would involve stating a plurality of substances, when in fact there is just one substance for all the individuals of a given kind. In consequence, since the substance of all individual human beings is the same, the word ‘man’ can only be used adequately in the singular form. In this contribution, Gregory's reasoning is reconstructed. In the second part of the paper, the posterity of his theory and its endorsement by Theodore Abū Qurrah at the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries are examined. (shrink)

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop a language containing plural predicates . ;The introduction of plural predicates leads to an extension of Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. I (...) argue that theories containing plural predicates can have plural ontological commitments in addition to singular ones. In this sense, I argue that the subject-matter of ontology is richer than one might have thought. ;Plural predicates turn out to be tremendously fruitful. For example, they provide us with natural formalizations for English plural definite descriptions and generalized quantifiers. They also allow us to state important set theoretic propositions, and give a formal semantics for second-order languages. Such a formal semantics is developed in the second paper, 'Toward a Theory of Second-Order Consequence', which is a collaboration with Gabriel Uzquiano. ;In the third paper, 'Frege's Unofficial Arithmetic', I consider an application of plural predicates to the philosophy of mathematics. By developing a suggestion of the later Frege, I show that any arithmetical predicate can be transformed into a plural predicate in such a way that the arithmetical predicate is true of the number of the Fs just in case the plural predicate is true of the Fs themselves. ;The transformation is important both because it can be put to use by nominalists about arithmetic and neo-Fregeans, and because it provides the foundations for an account of applied arithmetic. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the semantics of distributivity, grammatical number, and cardinality predicates. I argue that constructions involving so-called ‘dependent plurals’, i.e. plurals lacking cardinality predicates occurring in the scope of certain quantificational items such as all and most, pose a challenge to familiar semantic frameworks that distinguish between two sources of multiplicity: mereological plurality and distributive quantification. I argue that dependent plural readings should be analysed as distinct both from cumulative readings and distributive readings, in the classical sense. (...) I demonstrate how this can be accomplished in a semantic framework where expressions are evaluated relative to sets of assignments, or plural info states Proceedings of the 7th Amsterdam Colloquium, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1990, in Dekker and Stokhof Proceedings of the 9th Amsterdam Colloquium, ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1994, Some aspects of the Internal Structure of Discourse. The Dynamics of Nominal Anaphora. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 1996). The specific formal implementation is based on a modified version of Brasoveanu’s :129–209. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9035-0, 2008) Plural Compositional DRT. In this framework we are able to distinguish between two types of distributivity: weak distributivity across the assignments in a single plural info state and strong distributivity across multiple info states. I argue that both of these types of distributivity play a role in the semantics of natural language, accounting for the contrasting properties of ‘singular quantifiers’, such as each and every, and ‘plural quantifiers’, such as all and most. The contrasting properties of bare plurals and plurals involving cardinality modifiers are analysed in terms of the distinction between state-level and assignment-level plurality. (shrink)

Following the example of the late Professor R. S. Conway, who in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philological Society, vol. v, part i , discussed ‘The Use of the Singular Nos in Cicero's Letters’, I examined Catullus’ employment of the idiom in an article published in Mnemosyne, series iii, vol. vii, fasc. 2 , pp. 148–56. While the usage of Catullus exemplified various of Conway's indisputable types of the singular nos, such as the Plural of Authorship and (...) the Plural of Proprietorship, my observations did not confirm his main thesis of a ‘projective’ use, which L. C. Purser reviewing his rnonograph called ‘a Pluralis Dignitatis or Fiduciae, not to say Adrogantiae’, in direct contrast to the orthodox pluralis modestiae. I found that, where the use of nos related to a state of mind of the writer or speaker, not merely to circumstances of his environment, the usage in Catullus was either a pluralis modestiae or one of several derivative types. My examination of Virgil seems wholly to confirm the conclusions reached concerning Catullus, whose types of singular nos I classified as follows: the Plural of Proprietorship ; the Traveller's Plural ; the Local Plural ; the Plural of Authorship ; the Social and Domestic Plural ; the pluralis modestiae , pp. 87–9); the Plural of Pleading or Requesting; the Plural of Pathos or Self-pity. Of these , , , and are a product of circumstances of environment and relate to a group of which the speaker or writer is a member; , , , and express an attitude or state of mind. Virgil's examples of the usage fall into six of these categories, and being absent. For the purposes of the present study I shall, in order to indicate more clearly the connexion between and , and the subjective character of , number the six Virgilian categories as follows: the Plural of Proprietorship; the Social and Domestic Plural; the Plural of Authorship; the pluralis modestiae; the Plural of Pleading or Requesting; the Plural of Pathos, Self-pity, or Complaint. (shrink)

This paper pursues some of the consequences of the idea that there are (at least) two sources for distributive/cumulative interpretations in English. One source is lexical pluralization: All predicative stems are born as plurals, as Manfred Krifka and Fred Landman have argued. Lexical pluralization should be available in any language and should not depend on the particular make-up of its DPs. I suggest that the other source of cumulative/distributive interpretations in English is directly provided by plural DPs. DPs with (...) plural agreement features can ‘release’ those features to pluralize adjacent verbal projections. If there is a lexical source for distributive/cumulative interpretations, there should be instances of such interpretations with singular DPs. But there should also be cases of distributive/cumulative interpretations that require the presence of DPs with plural agreement morphology. (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)

Plural Logic is an extension of First-Order Logic which has, as well as singular terms and quantifiers, their plural counterparts. Analogously, Higher-Level Plural Logic is an extension of Plural Logic which has, as well as plural terms and quantifiers, higher-level plural ones. Roughly speaking, higher-level plurals stand to plurals like plurals stand to singulars; they are pluralised plurals. Allegedly, Higher-Level Plural Logic enjoys the expressive power of a simple type theory while committing (...) us to nothing more than the austere ontology of First-Order Logic. Were this true, Higher-Level Plural Logic would be a useful tool, with various applications in philosophy and linguistics. However, while the notions of plural reference and quantification enjoy widespread acceptance today, their higher-level counterparts have been received with a lot of scepticism. In this paper, I argue for the legitimacy of Higher-Level Plural Logic by providing evidence to the effect that natural languages contain higher-level plural expressions and showing that it is likely that they do so in an indispensable manner. Since the arguments I put forward are of the same sort advocates of Plural Logic have employed to defend their position, I conclude that the commonly held view that Plural Logic is legitimate, but not so its higher-level plural extensions is untenable. (shrink)

A distinction is introduced between itemized and non-itemized plural predication. It is argued that a full-fledged system of plural logic is not necessary in order to account for the validity of inferences concerning itemized collective predication. Instead, it is shown how this type of inferences can be adequately dealt with in a first-order logic system, after small modifications on the standard treatment. The proposed system, unlike plural logic, has the advantage of preserving completeness. And as a result, (...) inferences such as ‘Dick and Tony emptied the bottle, hence Tony and Dick emptied the bottle’ are shown to be first-order. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay examines the ways that the 2008 Constitution resignified Ecuador as a “plurinational” state, one that respects and affirms the sovereignty of the diverse Indigenous and Afro-descendent groups within it, as well as the ways that it redefined the family, shifting from a singular notion of family to one based on a notion of la familia diversa, the family in its diverse forms. We'll suggest that these linked redefinitions share a similar logic of multiplicity and open-endedness that work (...) to challenge monolithic and hegemonic social and political forms that had been imposed on Ecuador in a colonial context and then preserved in the postcolonial period. In doing so, we pay particularly close attention to the development of these concepts in contemporary Ecuadorian politics, as well as to ways in which their implementation has been limited, compromised, and forestalled. We argue that, far from being a change only on paper, the opening up of the definitions of the nation and the family in the Ecuadorian Constitution are important aspects of linguistic and institutional resistance to the coloniality of power in Ecuador. We explore ways that Ecuadorian activists maneuver the contradictions and challenges of engaging with the state in doing this work. (shrink)

According to ‘Strong Composition as Identity’, if an entity is composed of a plurality of entities, it is identical to them. As it has been argued in the literature, SCAI appears to give rise to some serious problems which seem to suggest that SCAI-theorists should take their plural quantifier to be governed by some ‘weak’ plural comprehension principle and, thus, ‘exclude’ some kinds of pluralities from their plural ontology. The aim of this paper is to argue that, (...) contrary to what may appear at first sight, the assumption of a weak plural comprehension principle is perfectly compatible with plural logic and the common uses of plural quantification. As I aim to show, SCAI-theorists can simply claim that their theory must be understood as formulated by means of the most ‘joint-carving’ plural quantifier, thus leaving open the possibility of other, less joint-carving, ‘unrestricted’ plural quantifiers. In the final part of the paper I will also suggest that SCAI-theorists should not only allow for singular quantification over pluralities of entities, but also for plural quantification over ‘super-pluralities’ of entities. (shrink)

Plural expressions found in natural languages allow us to talk about many objects simultaneously. Plural logic — a logical system that takes plurals at face value — has seen a surge of interest in recent years. This book explores its broader significance for philosophy, logic, and linguistics. What can plural logic do for us? Are the bold claims made on its behalf correct? After introducing plural logic and its main applications, the book provides a systematic analysis (...) of the relation between this logic and other theoretical frameworks such as set theory, mereology, higher-order logic, and modal logic. The applications of plural logic rely on two assumptions, namely that this logic is ontologically innocent and has great expressive power. These assumptions are shown to be problematic. The result is a more nuanced picture of plural logic's applications than has been given thus far. Questions about the correct logic of plurals play a central role in the final chapters, where traditional plural logic is rejected in favor of a "critical" alternative. The most striking feature of this alternative is that there is no universal plurality. This leads to a novel approach to the relation between the many and the one. In particular, critical plural logic paves the way for an account of sets capable of solving the set-theoretic paradoxes. (shrink)

English has plural terms as well as singular terms. But our standard formal languages, e.g., the predicate calculus, feature only singular terms. How can the plural idiom be formalized?‘Changing the subject’ is by far the most common plurals strategy among both philosophers and linguists: a plural term is replaced by a singular term standing for some complex object that ‘contains’ the individuals to which the plural term alludes. For example, one might simply replace (...) ‘A, B imply C’ with ‘{A, B} implies [singular] C’. We uncover a surprising variety of ways to change the subject, of ever‐increasing complexity and ingenuity. Our question is whether any can made to work. (shrink)

In 1903, in _The Principles of Mathematics_ (_PoM_), Russell endorsed an account of classes whereupon a class fundamentally is to be considered many things, and not one, and used this thesis to explicate his first version of a theory of types, adding that it formed the logical justification for the grammatical distinction between singular and plural. The view, however, was short-lived; rejected before _PoM_ even appeared in print. However, aside from mentions of a few misgivings, there is little (...) evidence about why he abandoned this view. In this paper, I speculate as to what those reasons were, and evaluate them in light of recent work and interest in plural logic. (shrink)

Dayal’s (2004) theory of kind terms accounts for the definiteness and number marking patterns in kind terms in many languages. Brazilian Portuguese has been claimed to be a counter-example to her theory as it seems to allow bare “singular” kind terms, which are predicted to be impossible according to her theory. However, the empirical status of the relevant data has not been clear so far. This paper presents a new data point from Singlish and confirms the existence of bare (...) “singular” kind terms. A revised theory of kind terms is proposed that accounts for it. The proposed theory puts forth a number system with three basic categories, i.e. singular, plural and general. It is claimed that bare “singular” kind terms are in fact derived from general NPs, which are associated with number-neutral properties. The paper also discusses why bare “singular” kind terms are not perfectly acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese. (shrink)

Gareth Evans' proposal, as amended by Steven Neale –that a definite pronoun with a quantifiedantecedent that does not bind it has the sense ofa definite description – has been challenged inthe singular case by appeal to counter-examplesinvolving failure of the uniqueness condition forthe legitimacy of a singular description. Thischallenge is here extended to the plural.Counter-examples are provided by cases in which aplural description `the Fs' does not denote,despite the propriety of the use of `they' or`them' it is (...) to replace, because of failure ofcumulativeness. A noncumulative predicate isnot distributive, and conditions for thelegitimacy of `the Fs' designed to accommodatenondistributive `Fs' are given in the context ofa two sorted theory with generalized quantifiers.Failure of cumulativeness is not to be confusedwith failure of maximality as Neale and othersdefine it. If not all Fs are Gs, `The Fs are Gs'is false; but it does not follow that `the Fs' isillegitimate; and if `Fs' is distributive. it isso only if there are no Fs. These differencesgranted, I give a partial defense of theEvans–Neale proposal from deficiencies in analternative based on the views of P. T.Geach. (shrink)