Semantics and the Plural Conception of Reality
Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information)This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact : [email protected] to use this work in a way not covered by the license.
For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy.
Abstract
According to the singular conception of reality, there are objects and there are singular properties, i.e. properties that are instantiated by objects separately. It has been argued that semantic considerations about plurals give us reasons to embrace a plural conception of reality. This is the view that, in addition to singular properties, there are plural properties, i.e. properties that are instantiated jointly by many objects. In this article, I propose and defend a novel semantic account of plurals which dispenses with plural properties and thus undermines the semantic argument in favor of the plural conception of reality.