This Lunch Forum will be a remote talk. We will meet in GMH, room 452. It is also possible to follow the seminar on Zoom. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to ingvihar@uio.no.
Florio is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and Professor II at CPS. He specializes in philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics. His published work focuses on questions about the nature of logic and the foundations of semantics. He is currently working on foundational issues in knowledge representation and on topics at the intersection of philosophy and computer science.
Singularism, Pluralism, and Definitional Equivalence
Atomistic classical mereology and plural logic provide two alternative frameworks for the analysis of plurals in natural language. It is a matter of dispute which framework is preferable. From the formal point of view, however, there is a strong sense in which the two frameworks are equivalent. So they have the same coverage as each other: there is a range of data about plurals that they both capture correctly. We argue that the tie is broken when we consider a wider range of linguistic phenomena, such as mass nouns and group nouns. Mereology is more flexible than plural logic and is thus more easily adapted to account for these richer fragments of natural language.