Theories of Masses and Problems of Constitution

Abstract

The distinction between and has proven to be of considerable interest to both linguists and philosophers. There are familiar syntactic criteria for the distinction: count nouns admit of pluralization, can occur with numerals, take 'a' and 'every' in the singular and 'few' and 'many' in the plural; while mass nouns always take singular verbs, cannot occur with numerals, take determiners like 'much' and 'little' rather than 'few' and 'many', and so on.' Such criteria for mass nouns put words like 'gold', 'water', 'air', 'time', 'freedom', 'happiness', etc. into the same syntactic category; but this fact is not likely to suggest to us that, for example, 'the gold in his pocket' and 'the freedom he enjoys' denote entities belonging to the same ontological category. In order to arrive at an interesting philosophical subject by way of mass terms, let us consider just those mass nouns that promise to be of importance for the ontology of physical objects-Tyler Burge's concrete mass terms:2