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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Epistemology, theory of knowledge
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Words without Objects - Semantics, Ontology, and Logic for Non-Singularity (Hardcover, New)
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Words without Objects - Semantics, Ontology, and Logic for Non-Singularity (Hardcover, New)
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A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects,
distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It
is however one of two main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it
is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space
for stuff like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always
ask 'how many?', but with stuff the question has to be 'how much?'
Within philosophy, stuff of certain basic kinds is central to the
ancient pre-Socratic world-view; but it also constitutes the field
of modern chemistry and is a major factor in ecology. Philosophers
these days, in general, are unlikely to deny that stuff exists. But
they are very likely to deny that it is ('ultimately') to be
contrasted with things, and it is on this account that logic and
semantics figure largely in the framework of the book. Elementary
logic is a logic which takes values for its variables; and these
values are precisely distinct individuals or things. Existence is
then symbolized in just such terms; and this, it is proposed,
creates a pressure for 'reducing' stuff to things. Non-singular
expressions, which include words for stuff, 'mass' nouns, and also
plural nouns, are 'explicated' as semantically singular. Here then
is the second target of the book. The posit that both mass and
plural nouns name special categories of objects (set-theoretical
'collections' of objects in the one case, mereological 'parcels' or
'portions' of stuff in the other) represents, so Laycock urges, the
imposition of an alien logic upon both the many and the much.
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