Plurals and Mereology

Mereology and Rough Mereology: Rough Mereological Granulation

In this chapter, we embark on a more specific granulation theory, stemming from the mereological theory of things. This mechanism provides us with tolerance and weak tolerance relations forming a graded similarity in the sense of Chap.1 and with resulting therefrom granules. To put the necessary notions in a proper order, we are going to discuss mereology, rough mereology and the mereological g...

Mereology, Modality and Magic

If the property being a methane molecule is a universal, then it is a structural universal: objects instantiate being a methane molecule just in case they have the right sorts of proper parts arranged in the right sort of way. Lewis argued that there can be no satisfactory account of structural universals; in this paper I provide a satisfactory account.

Context Mereology

We show that under a small number of assumptions, it is possible to interpret truth in a context as a quantification over truth in 'atomic' or pointlike contexts, which are transparent to all the connectives. We discuss the necessary assumptions and suggest conditions under which they are intuitively reasonable. Introduction This note is inspired by the context logic originally introduced by J....

Algebraic Semantics and Mereology

Mass Nouns and Plurals

Determinerless (or “bare”) mass and plural noun phrases also show a parallel alternation in interpretation, depending on the predicate with which they combine. If the predicate is stagelevel (in the terminology of Carlson 1977a,b), the noun phrase is understood as existentially quantified, as in (4)a. and b., which are roughly equivalent to Some water leaked into the floor and Some raccoons wer...