Kinds of Predicate

In this paper I distinguish three kinds of kinds: traditional philosophical kinds such as truth, knowledge, and causation; natural science kinds such as spin, charge and mass; and social kinds such as class, poverty, and marriage. The three-fold taxonomy I work with represents an idealised abstraction from the wide variety of kinds that there are and the messy phenomena that underlie them. However, the kinds I identify are discrete, and the three-fold taxonomy is useful when it comes to understanding claims (...) about the normativity, scope, and implementation of conceptual engineering. In particular it reveals: first, that conceptual engineering in a broad sense is not distinctively normative; but second, that there is a distinctive normativity present in conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration; third, that conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration is only possible for terms that refer to kinds whose grounds we can change; and fourth, that the amelioration of such kind terms can be brought about as a result of changing the grounds of those kinds. The overall aim is to draw attention to the differences between kinds of kinds to make sense of the diverse and often conflicting claims in the conceptual engineering literature, both from its proponents and from its detractors. The hope is that paying attention to the differences between kinds of kinds will provide a better understanding of the landscape. (shrink)

Upward monotonic semantics for necessity modals give rise to Ross’s Puzzle: they predict that □φ entails □(φ ∨ ψ), but common intuitions about arguments of this form suggest they are invalid. It is widely assumed that the intuitive judgments involved in Ross’s Puzzle can be explained in terms of the licensing of ‘Diversity’ inferences: from □(φ ∨ ψ), interpreters infer that the truth of each disjunct (φ, ψ) is compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I introduce two pieces of (...) data that this analysis fails to explain. Analyzing this data, I argue, suggests that necessity modals with embedded disjunctions license ‘Independence’ inferences: from the truth of □(φ ∨ ψ), interpreters infer that φ-without-ψ and ψ-without-φ are each compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I outline a bilateral inquisitive semantics for necessity modals that predicts the validity of the Independence inferences. I then argue that the resulting theory should be understood as one on which disjunctions denote pluralities of propositions, and necessity modals behave like collective predicates applied to these pluralities. (shrink)

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational (...) perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions. (shrink)

This paper explores a novel analysis of adjectives in the comparative and the positive based on the notion of a trope, rather than the notion of a degree. Tropes are particularized properties, concrete manifestations of properties in individuals. The point of departure is that a sentence like ‘John is happier than Mary’ is intuitively equivalent to ‘John’s happiness exceeds Mary’s happiness’, a sentence that expresses a simple comparison between two tropes, John’s happiness and Mary’s happiness. The analysis received particular support (...) from various parallels between adjectival constructions and corresponding adjective nominalizations which make reference to tropes. (shrink)

The paper revisits Sharvy's theory of plural definite descriptions. An alternative account of plural definite descriptions building on the ideas of plural quantification and non-distributive plural predication is developed. Finally, the alternative is extrapolated to account for generic uses of definite descriptions.

Along with many other languages, English has a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction between mass-occurrences of nouns and their countoccurrences. As the mass-count distinction, in my view, is best drawn between occurrences of expressions, rather than expressions themselves, it becomes important that there be some rule-governed way of classifying a given noun-occurrence into mass or count. The project of classifying noun-occurrences is the topic of Section II of this paper. Section III, the remainder of the paper, concerns the semantic differences between (...) nouns in their mass-occurrences and those in their count-occurrences. As both the name view and the mixed view are, in my opinion, subject to serious difficulties discussed in Section III.1,I defend a version of the predicate view. Traditionally, nouns in their singular count-occurrences are also analyzed as playing the semantic role of a predicate. How, then, does the predicate view preserve the intuitive difference between nouns in their mass- and those in their count-occurrences? I suggest, in Section III.2, that there are different kinds of predicates: mass-predicates, e.g. ‘is hair’, singular count-predicates, e.g. ‘is a hair’, and plural count-predicates, e.g. ‘are hairs’. Mass-predicates and count-predicates, in my view, are not reducible to each other. The remainder of Section III takes a closer look at the differences and interrelations between these different kinds of predicates. Mass-predicates and count-predicates differ from each other truth-conditionally, and these truth-conditional differences turn out to have interesting implications, in particular concerning the part-whole relation and our practices of counting. But mass- and count-predicates are also related to each other through systematic entailment relations; these entailment relations are examined in Section III.4. (shrink)

My thesis examines the mass/count distinction; that is, to illustrate, the distinction between the role of "hair" in "There is hair in my soup" and "There is a hair in my soup". In "hair" has a mass-occurrence; in a count-occurrence. These two kinds of noun-occurrences, I argue, can be marked off from each other largely on syntactic grounds. Along the semantic dimension, I suggest that, in order to account for the intuitive distinction between nouns in their mass-occurrences and their singular (...) count-occurrences, there must be a difference between the semantic role each of them plays. From among the available options, the most attractive one is to analyze nouns in their mass-occurrences as predicates. But, traditionally, nouns in their singular count-occurrences are also analyzed as predicates. I propose, therefore, that there are two different kinds of predicates: mass-predicates, such as "is-hair", and singular count-predicates, such as "is-a-hair". Neither kind is reducible to the other. ;Mass-predicates and singular count-predicates have something in common: they are both predicates. That is, they are related to their extension in the same way, viz. They are both true of whatever falls in their extension and the relation "is-true-of" at play here is, I conjecture, the same in both cases. The two kinds of predicates are also related to each other in a certain way, namely through a one-way entailment relation going from count to mass: everything that is a hair is also hair, but not conversely. And, finally, there are certain truth-conditional differences between them: the singular count-predicate "is-a-hair" is true only of whole individual hairs; the mass-predicate "is-hair" is true of individual hairs as well as hair-sums and hair-parts. ;These truth-conditional differences turn out to have interesting implications, in particular having to do with the part/whole relation and the act of counting. It is often held that mass-predicates are, as part of their meaning, homogeneous, while singular count-predicates are said to lack this property, as part of their meaning. I suggest, instead, that at least distributivity has to be rejected as a semantic property of mass-predicates, on the grounds that, to pick a representative example, water is not infinitely divisible into parts that are themselves water. The second kind of implication, having to do with the act of counting, is as follows. When we wish to associate, say, the world's hair with cardinal number , we need to speak of it in terms of individual hairs, the things of which the singular count-predicate "is-a-hair" is true. If, on the other hand, we are interested in amounts of hair , we need to speak of the world's hair in terms of those things of which the mass-predicate "is-hair" is true. (shrink)

Plurality, Conjunction and Events presents a novel theory of plural and conjoined phrases, in an event-based semantic framework. It begins by reviewing options for treating the alternation between `collective' and `distributive' readings of sentences containing plural or conjoined noun phrases, including analyses from both the modern and the premodern literature. It is argued that plural and conjoined noun phrases are unambiguously group-denoting, and that the collective/distributive distinction therefore must be located in the predicates with which these noun phrases combine. More (...) specifically, predicates must have a hidden argument place for events; the collective/distributive distinction may then be represented in the part/whole structure of these events. This allows a natural treatment of `collectivizing' adverbial expressions, and of `pluractional' affixes; it also allows a unified semantics for conjunction, in which conjoined sentences and predicates denote groups of events, much like conjoined noun phrases denote groups of individuals. (shrink)

Recently, and rather startlingly, given the history of the debate about a name's semantic content, some claim that names are in fact predicates -- predicativism. Some of predicativists claim that a name's semantic content involves the concept of being called -- calling accounts that have been traditionally meta-linguistic. However, these accounts fail to be informative. Inspired by Burge's claim that proper names are literally true of the individuals that have them, Fara develops a non-meta-linguistic concept of being called analysed in (...) terms of property attributions. I offer seven separate reasons for rejecting the account, one of which is that Fara's development of the view, at least, has implausible consequences for a theory of name acquisition. I sketch an alternative account of name acquisition that is meta-linguistic in nature, but because it is not offered as a theory of name's content, the standard worries fail to apply. In fact, I argue that an account of name acquisition must be meta-linguistic, and therefore a more nuanced conception of meta-linguistic speech acts is required. The account invokes Austin's performative-constative distinction. It analyses name acquisition as due to performative meta-linguistic speech acts. (shrink)