Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems.

Review Author[s] :
Harold W. Noonan

The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 120. (Jul., 1980), pp. 259-260.

Stable URL:
1-8094%28198007%2930%3A120%3C259%3AMTSPP%3E2.O.CO%3B2-P
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=003

The Philosophical Quarterly is currently published by The Philosophical Quarterly.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you
have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and
you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/philquar.htm1.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or
printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of
scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org/
Mon Oct 30 04:05:30 2006
 BOOK REVIEWS 259
My disagreements with Caws are, as I have tried to show, a t a deep level. Those
who want a careful and sympathetic introduction to the arguments of Sartre which is
nevertheless prepared to be strongly critical will do well to read this book.
ANTHONY MANSER

Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems. Edited by F. J. PELLETIER.(Reidel. 1979.

Pp. xiv+304. Price Dfl. 70.00.)

Masa Terms is a collection of nineteen papers, by sixteen authors. Most of the

papers have been previously published but there are three original contributions: the
papers by Sharvy and Bunt and the second paper by Pelletier. I n what follows I shall
indicate briefly what each paper contains, spending a little more time on those that
struck me as most significant.
Pelletier's "Non-Singular Reference: Some Preliminaries" argues that the syn-
tactical count/mass distinction is philosophically uninteresting but that the philosophi-
cally significant sortal/non-sortal distinction can "in a way" be generated from the
grammatical one. The count/mass distinction can only apply to senses of words, Pelle-
tier argues, since every term usable in a mass sense has a count sense too and, he
suggests tentatively, conversely.
Ware's "Some Bits and Pieces" argues for the sceptical conclusion that for many
uses of nouns there will be no way of telling whether they are count or mass terms.
Helen Cartwright's "Some Remarks about Mass Nouns and Plurality" disputes
both this view and Pelletier's view that the oount/mass distinction is philosophically
uninteresting. She stresses the close analogy between mass nouns and plural count
nouns and argues that quantities of stuff (e.g., what can be said to be some water) are
full-fledged objects.
Richard Sharvy's "The Indeterminacy of Mass Predication" argues that, pace
Quine, mass nouns are subject to the same indeterminacy as count nouns. Pelletier's
reply disputes Sharvy's conclusion and suggests that mereology should be rejected as
a way of accounting for mass predication.
Zemach's well-known "Four Ontologies" argues that we may regard the world as
consisting entirely of entities bounded in space and time (events) or of entities bounded
in space but not time (continuants) or of entities bounded in time but not space
(processes) or of entities unbounded in both space and time (types). His second paper
defends the claim that a type ontology is adequate against certain objections.
Laycock's "Theories of Matter", the longest paper in the volume, argues that the
existence of matter is incompatible with the "ontology of objects" (essentially the view
summed up in Quine's slogan "No entity without identity"). He takes Helen Cartwright
to task for attempting to find a place for matter within the object ontology, asserting
that the most objectionable feature of her view is the close analogy she finds between
quantities of stuff and sets-abstract objects. But the gold of my wife's wedding ring
surely is in some respects like the abstract object, the shape of that ring-at least, the
former is no more a possible object of ostension than the latter.
Kathleen Cook's "The Usefulness of Quantities" is a careful exposition and defence
of the notion of a quantity. It left me wholly convinced.
Terence Parsons' well-known "An Analysis of Mass Terms and Amount Terms"
proposes a n analysis of mass terms in subject position as complex, composed of a sub-
stance abstraction operator and a mass predioate, the mass predioate itself being re-
.
garded as analysable as 'is a quantity o f . . .' where '. .' is a primitive name of the
substance in question. Parsons' second paper, "Afterthoughts", explains what his
present position is. The only major change is that he would now wish, following the
majority as he says, to leave mass term predicates unanalysed.
260 BOOK REVIEWS

Richard Montague's "The Proper Treatment of Mass Terms in English" presents

what he regards as an amplification of Parsons' earlier treatment, identifying Parsons'
substances with properties and giving a n analysis of Parsons' 'quantity of'.
Helen Cartwright's "Amounts and Measures of Amount" presents a continuation
of her earlier work on quantities and discusses the formal properties of measurements
of quantities.
Tyler Burge's "Mass Terms, Count Nouns, and Change" is the most interesting
paper in the volume. He distinguishes two approaches to sentenoes describing changes
in the matter of an object. One is the Relational Approach, the distinguishing feature
of which is that mass nouns are consistently represented as relational predicates,
specifically predicates signifying relations between objects and times. The other ap-
proach is the C-Approach. According t o this, mass nouns and count nouns alike are
represented as one-place predicates and the 'is' in sentenoes like 'That engine is now
aluminium' is represented by a non-logical -
-
primitive like 'constitutes' or 'coincides
with' (on the ~ e l a t i o n a l~ ~ p r o a cit his interpreted as the 'is' of tensed predication).
Burge f i s t argues convincingly that the Relational Approach must extend its relativiza-
tion strategy to count nouns, with the consequence that the vast majority of sortals
turn out to be mere phase sortals. He finds this anti-essentialism unpalatable but he
does not make it the ground of his objeotion to the Relational Approach. Rather, he
thinks, its crucial defects emerge when we consider sentences like 'Exactly one river
extends through Heraclitus' home town' or 'All the gold on earth is over half a billion
years old'. Counting and dating, he claims, are the weak spots of the Relational Ap-
proach. The argument for this is too lengthy to explain here, but it is a powerful one
meriting very careful consideration by any proponent of the Relational Approach.
Riohard Grandy's "Stuff and Things" suggests that the referents of count nouns
are relations between quantities of matter and times and thus abstract entities, while
quantities of matter lie within the range of first-level variables. But, as Brian Chellas
argues in his "Quantity and Quantification", his arguments do not seem sufficiently
strong to warrant acceptance of such a counter-intuitive conclusion.
A similar proposal is put forward in Gabbay's and Moravosik's "Sameness and
Individuation" and the same objeotion appears to apply.
Finally, H. C. Bunt's "Ensembles and the Formal Semantic Properties of Mass
Terms" gives a detailed presentation of his "ensemble theory"; which is an adaptation
of mereology, and George Bealer, in "Predication and Matter", investigates an analysis
of the logical form of sentenoes involving mass terms according to which 'is' is a n un-
ambiguous term, but where different sentences using 'is' get different "readings"
depending upon the sort of term in the predicate.
On the whole this is a n interesting collection, containing a t least six papers which
are indispensable reading for anyone concerned with the problem of mass terms.
HAROLDW. NOONAN

Skepticism and Cognitivism. By OLIVERA. JOHNSON.

(California U.P. 1979. Pp. xiv
+294. Price £9.75.)

If one believes that the problem of scepticism goes when we give up the idea that
knowledge must be built on known foundations, then this book will induce nothing
but the despairing feeling that Wittgenstein, Quine and many others have written in
vain. If one finds sceptical arguments genuinely problematical and wants to teach a
scepticism course sympathetically, then I think this would make a good text book,
and for those who might be interested I shall summarize the contents without further
comment.