seminaire reference juin 28 (!) Alex Oliver

[Friederike.Moltmann at UNIV-PARIS1.FR]

Cher-e-s collegues,

Dans le cadre du séminaire sur la référence (IHPST) nous avons le
plaisir d'annoncer une séance speciale, exceptionellement le jeudi, animé par
Alex Oliver (University of Cambridge)

Thursday, June 28, 2007
11-13
IHPST
13 rue du Four
75006 Paris



                        What is plural reference?

In this talk, I will start by articulating and defending the notion of a
plural term. Terms may be classified according to the number of things they
can refer to. A singular term cannot refer to more than one thing, a plural
term can. Examples of plural terms are: 'Discovery Rocks', 'the prime
numbers', 'Henry VIII's wives', '2 and -2'.

About a singular term it can be asked whether or not it refers. But about a
plural term that refers to several things, it can also be asked how it
refers to these things. Different writers on plural logic give different
answers. A minority claim that plural reference is distributive. They say
that e.g. 'Tom, Dick and Harry' refers to Tom, refers to Dick, refers to
Harry, and refers to Tom, Dick and Harry (not to mention the intermediate
pairs: Tom and Dick, etc). On the other side, a majority argue that plural
reference must be collective, not distributive. They say that 'Tom, Dick
and Harry' refers to Tom, Dick and Harry, and that's it.

I examine the arguments for collective as opposed to distributive plural
reference. In one way or another, they turn on the idea that only
collective reference allows us to capture the truth-conditions of plural
predications. I will show that the arguments all fail. In doing so, I will
need to discuss different kinds of metalinguistic plural description of the
form 'the things that the term P refers to', as well as the corresponding
free relatives ('what the term P refers to').

The moral of the talk is that plural terms exhibit a new kind of
indeterminacy of reference. The indeterminacy does not concern the worldly
referents of such terms, but rather the manner in which they refer.


-- 
Friederike Moltmann
Directrice de recherche
Chaire d'Excellence 'Ontological Structure and Semantic Structure'
Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences
et des Techniques (IHPST)
13 rue du Four
75006 Paris, France

http://semantics.univ-paris1.fr



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