Thin Mereological Sums, Abstraction, and Interpretational Modalities

Can mereological sums serve as the semantic values of plurals?

Mereological Essentialism and Mereological Inessentialism

Mereological essentialists argue that mereological summations cannot change their parts. Mereological inessentialists argue that mereological summations can change some or all of their parts. In this paper I articulate and defend a position called Moderate Mereological Inessentialism, according to which certain mereological summations can change some, but not all, of their parts. Persistent mer...

Thin sums matroids and duality

Thin sums matroids were introduced to extend the notion of representability to non-finitary matroids. We give a new criterion for testing when the thin sums construction gives a matroid. We show that thin sums matroids over thin families are precisely the duals of representable matroids (those arising from vector spaces). We also show that the class of tame thin sums matroids is closed under du...

Exhibiting interpretational and representational validity

A natural language argument may be valid in at least two nonequivalent senses: it may be interpretationally or representationally valid (cf. Etchemendy 1990). Interpretational and representational validity can both be formally exhibited by classical first-order logic. However, as these two notions of informal validity differ extensionally and first-order logic fixes one determinate extension fo...

Interpretational Strategies and Semantic Identities

It is not possible to model semantics of natural language unless one can clearly establish the structure of contextual information and how "context" guides the construction of semantic identities of linguistic units. We claim that this cannot be done unless one can overcome the representational locality imposed by extensional formalisms. In this paper we present a formalism aiming at setting up...