Unity and Plurality: Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics

by Massimiliano Carrara (Editor), Alexandra Arapinis (Editor), Friederike Moltmann (Editor)

Overview

Unity and Plurality presents novel ways of thinking about plurality while casting new light on the interconnections among the logical, philosophical, and linguistic aspects of plurals. The volume brings together new work on the logic and ontology of plurality and on the semantics of plurals in natural language. Plural reference, the view that definite plurals such as 'the students' refer to several entities at once (the individual students), is an approach favoured by logicians and philosophers, who take sentences with plurals ('the students gathered') not to be committed to entities beyond individuals, entities such as classes, sums, or sets. By contrast, linguistic semantics has been dominated by a singularist approach to plurals, taking the semantic value of a definite plural such as 'the students' to be a mereological sum or set. Moreover, semantics has been dominated by a particular ontological view of plurality, that of extensional mereology. This volume aims to build a bridge between the two traditions and to show the fruitfulness of nonstandard mereological approaches. A team of leading experts investigates new perspectives that arise from plural logic and non-standard mereology and explore novel applications to natural language phenomena.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198716327
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Massimiliano Carrara, University of Padua,Alexandra Arapinis, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento,Friederike Moltmann, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Massimiliano Carrara is Associate professor of Logic and Philosophy of Language at the University of Padua (Italy). He is also Principal investigator of the COGITO Research centre in Philosophy, University of Bologna. He has been visiting professor at Columbia University (New York), at the ILLC (Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation), UVA (Amsterdam), at the Department of Philosophy, Delft, University of Technology, at the School of Philosophy of the University of Melbourne, and at the at the LOA-CNR (Trento, Italy). His main research interests are in logic, philosophy of logic, applied logic, and metaphysics.

Alexandra Arapinis is Marie Curie Post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology in Trento. She has received a PhD in Philosophy from Sorbonne University (Paris).

Friederike Moltmann is research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France and senior visiting fellow in the philosophy department at New York University. Her research is in philosophy and linguistic semantics and especially the interface between the two. She is author of Parts and Wholes in Semantics (OUP, 1997) and Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language (OUP 2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction, Massimiliano Carrara and Friederike MoltmannPart I. Pluralities in Logic1. Relations as Plural-Predications in Plato, Theodore Scaltsas2. How to Harness Basic Law V, Oystein Linnebo3. Singularist Predicative Analyses and Boolos's Second-Order Pluralism, Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley4. The Ontology and Logic of Higher-Order Multitudes, Peter Simons5. The Logicality of Second-Order Logic: An Analysis in Terms of Plural Arbitrary Reference and Acts of Choice, Francesca Boccuni, Massimiliano Carrara, and Enrico MartinoPart II. Pluralities in Semantics6. Plural Reference and Reference to a Plurality: Linguistic Facts and Semantic Analyses, Friederike Moltmann7. Quantifiers, Determiners, and Plural Constructions, Byeong-uk Yi8. Mass and Plural, Thomas J. McKay9. Linguistic Plurality and the Conceptualization of Part Structure, Paolo Acquaviva10. Partial Involvement: Groups and their Structure, Alexandra Arapinis

Editorial Reviews

"Unity and Plurality successfully shows the importance of dealing with the phenomenon of plurals in logic, philosophy, and linguistics. It covers many of the fundamental debates concerning plurals and it provides accessible tools to venture further in those debates." — Riccardo Baratella, The Philosophical Quarterly

"Going beyond possible individuals, this promising line of research will also seek to take into account perspectivization and the role of the cognitive agent in determining what counts in a context as a plurality or a multitude...How knowledge and subjectivity enter the realm of plurality is a question to which the papers in the book lead, thus renewing the debate in a long-standing tradition that, since Plato, has still not entirely grasped what pluralities are and can be." — Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher