properties of masses

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@crl.com>]

I agree with xorxes that my description of the use of mass terms fits ill
with the default quantifiers for mass expressions.  But I have some doubts
about the default quantifiers for all the essentially singular descriptors
(I have doubts about all the default quantifiers, if the truth were known,
but I can make them stick in these cases).  Consider the claim that the
man touched the door.  If you take quantifiers seriously (possibly a
mistake), you have to say that that mean that some part of the man touched
the door -- clearly all of him did not.  But if you say that the man
entered the room, you presumably mean that all of him did, not just a part
(though, of course, each of the parts did too).  So, what is the default
quantifier here, given that we say "the man" both times?  Notice, by the
way, that if we try to get hyperaccurate and say that the man's hand (or
fingertips) touched the door, we end up saying something very different
from when we say that the man did it. I suspect that the correct answer
about default quantifiers (assuming we want to mess with them at all) is
that they are contextually defined, another kind of conventional
implication, often largely conditioned by the main predicate (as in the
cases above).
In short, quantifiers or no, the description I gave of the
behavior of mass sumti vis a vis the underlying individual and submass
sumti is correct in broad strokes.  The picky details require almost case
by case work, again largely depending upon the predicates involved.
pc>|83