Unity and Plurality

Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics

Massimiliano Carrara editor Friederike Moltmann editor Alexandra Arapinis editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:17th Mar '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Unity and Plurality cover

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.

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 *
there is much to be learned from Unity & Plurality. The specialist in any of the fields represented will find thought-provoking developments but will also catch a glimpse of other disciplines involved in the study of plurals. The book stimulates fascinating comparisons, too. For instance, that pluralist approaches have found their way more easily into philosophy and philosophical logic -- rather than natural language semantics -- may be in itself food for thought. * Lorenzo Azzano, Dialectica *
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 multitudeHow 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 Review *

ISBN: 9780198716327

Dimensions: 241mm x 177mm x 22mm

Weight: 556g

276 pages