Group Nouns, Social Groups: Metaphysics in Semantics

Katherine Ritchie (City College of New York)

Abstract: Group nouns, expressions like team and committee, seem to denote entities that are in some sense one and in another sense many. I use predication and agreement data to argue that group nouns have a dual denotation. I argue that other semantic data shows that the denotations of group nouns can vary in members and that there can be distinct coincident groups. The data involving group nouns requires a semantic treatment and calls out for a metaphysical account of groups. I argue that groups are structured wholes. The metaphysical view delivers accounts of both groups-as-one and groups-as-many. Moreover, it can account for variation in group members and group identity conditions. Finally, I sketch a novel semantics for group nouns that takes metaphysics seriously and delivers a neat explanation of predication and entailment patterns.