The world of the uncountable

Henry Laycock (Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Clare Hall Cambridge)

Henry Laycock (Queen's University, Canada) will give a talk in Aix-en-Provence, France, on the 21th of January, 17h.

title  : "The world of the uncountable"

Abstract :
The work of the linguist Otto Jespersen remains largely neglected by philosophers. Yet in his writings on what he calls ‘mass-words’ and ‘thing words’, Jespersen makes some deeply insightful observations on matters of great semantic and also metaphysical interest. Jespersen contrasts thing words (what he also calls ‘countables’) with mass-words (what he also calls ‘uncountables’), speaking of the latter as words for substances. He tells us that "Mass-words are totally different, logically they are neither singular nor plural, because what they stand for is not countable."  He also tells us that a distinctive logical form would be called for "when we left the world of countables (such as houses, horses, days, miles, sounds, words, crimes, plans, mistakes, etc.) and got to the world of uncountables." Here I attempt to explain the significance of Jespersen’s remarks. I focus on three ideas: that of the world of the uncountable, that of a ‘totally different logic’, and that of the uncountable itself. These three ideas constitute the three parts of the work. The first part concerns the realm of the uncountable, and distinguishes between ontology and the metaphysics of the life-world. Part two addresses the distinctive logical form of mass-words, while part three addresses the nature of ‘uncountability’, and explains what it is not.

The talk will take place in Aix-Marseille University, Maison de la Recherche, Room 2.41.
see http://semaihp.blogspot.fr