Link on (Intensional) Masses

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

Godehard Link. 1983. The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: 
A Lattice-theoretical Approach. In Baeuerle, R., C. Schwarze & A. von 
Stechow (eds), Meaning, Use and the Interpretation of Language. 
Berlin: de Gruyter. 303-23.

[Link does an extensionalist approach to substance: he has a, b, the 
goo of a, the goo of a+b (his mu-operator below is the goo of all 
x:P(x)), and the collective of a+b.]

Before I go on to present my own approach I want to say something 
about what ter Meulen calls nominal mass terms. Typical examples are 
stuff names like "gold" in sentences like "gold has the atomic number 
79". But there is also the time-honoured sentence "water is 
widespread" in which the term "water" has apparently a somewhat 
different status. It seems to refer to the concrete "scattered 
invidivual" that you just find everywhere, hence Quine's analysis in 
terms of mereology. In this sense the sentence should be synonymous 
with "the water (on earth) is widespread". Of the same type is the 
use of "gold" in "America's gold is stored in Fort Knox." Here, 
again, a concrete object is referred to by "America's gold", namely 
the material fusion of all quantities of the US gold reserve. [In my 
terms, the Substance of the Collective of the Individuals of Stuff]. 
So there can be no doubt that some notion of fusion is needed to 
account for definite descriptions involving predicative mass terms 
(the mu-operator defined below does just this.) Genuine stuff names, 
however, are something else. Substances are abstract entities and 
cannot be defined in terms of their concrete manifestations. The 
question, then, is of what kind the connections are that are 
intuitively felt between substances and their quantities. Take 
water, for instance. A quantity is water if it displays the internal 
structure of water, that is H2O. But this relation is not a logical 
one. Or else we might look for substance properties which carry over 
to the quantities of the substance in question. Water is a liquid and 
yet, all concrete water might be frozen. So we have to go to 
dispositional properties, getting more and more involved into our 
knowledge of the physical world... What I am getting at is that 
*nominal mass terms do not seem to have a proper logic*. Be that as 
it may, this issue is completely independent of the lattice structure 
that governs the behaviour of predicative mass terms and plural 
expressions; it is only this structure that I want to address myself 
to in the present paper.



[... So Link only talks about bits of stuff, in the end: extensional 
quantities. In fact, he only ever has "goo of thing" not "goo on its 
own", or even "some of the goo."

His footnote has me worried:]

Contributions to the problem of substance names can be found in 
Pelletier (1979) (in particular, Parsons (1979)), Bunt (1979), and 
ter Meulen (1980, 1981). Let me comment on the latter work, which is 
formulated in a Montague framework. The few remarks I made here will 
make it evident that I fully agree with ter Meulen in that nominal 
mass nouns cannot be *reduced* to predicative mass nouns. But for 
this very reason I fail to see any cogent argument for the kind of 
denotation ter Meulen wants to assign to these terms at a given 
reference point (i.e. intension functions denoting in each world the 
set of concrete quantities of the substance in quesion.) As it turns 
out, the arguments she puts forth in ter Meulen (1981) really lend 
support only to the first, the critical point (viz. that reduction is 
impossible.) But what she then goes on to call a nominal mass noun's 
"extensional reference to an intensional object" (viz. the intension 
function referred to above) seems to me both syntactically and 
semantically misguided. For the inevitable doubling of syntactic 
rules is certainly unwelcome, to begin with. But what is more, those 
intension functions, even when lifted to still another intensional 
level as ter Meulen wants to have it, are simply not well motivated 
as substance name denotations. The statement, for instance, that two 
fictional substaces can be differentiated (op. cit., p. 438) is not 
compatible with the principle of rigid designation introduced earlier 
(op. cit., p. 424). More generally, there are no rules that could 
justify intuitively valid inferences from contexts involving nominal 
mass nouns to contexts with their corresponding predicative terms --- 
it is my view, anyway, that such inferences are not based on pure 
logic alone. conclude from this that the problem of nominal mass 
nouns is best approached in a spirit of logical abstinence. Nominal 
mass nouns denote abstract entities, to be sure, and as such they are 
the names of individuals just like "John", "Munich", and the rest. 
Beyond this minimal account things become notoriously vague.



[I swear to God I did not read this footnote before I said "half the 
water is a Kind." I *think* he's saying "Water is a Kind, and as such 
does not admit any extensional definition." In particular, looking 
for concrete bits of water in possible worlds isn't going to cut it: 
the reference is rather more generic than that.

I think he's right.

I think this is our solution. In which case, it's no coincidence that 
both And's Substance-Not-Just-Bits-of-Substance and my current Kind 
are quantified by tu'o. They *are* the same thing.]

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* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@unimelb.edu.au *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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