Plural Logic

Synopsis

Alex Oliver And Timothy Smiley Provide The Natural Point Of Entry To What For Most Readers Will Be A New Subject. Plural Logic Deals With Plural Terms, Plural Predicates, And Plural Quantification. Current Logic Is Singularist: Its Terms Stand For At Most One Thing. By Contrast, The Foundational Thesis Of This Book Is That A Particular Term May Legitimately Stand For Several Things At Once; In Other Words, There Is Such A Thing As Genuinely Plural Denotation. The Authors Argue That Plural Phenomena Need To Be Taken Seriously And That The Only Viable Response Is To Adopt A Plural Logic, A Logic Based On Plural Denotation. They Expound A Framework Of Ideas That Includes The Distinction Between Distributive And Collective Predicates, The Theory Of Plural Descriptions, Multivalued Functions, And Lists. A Formal System Of Plural Logic Is Presented In Three Stages. This Second Edition Includes A Greatly Expanded Treatment Of The Paradigm Empty Term Zilch, A Much Strengthened Treatment Of Cantorian Set Theory, And A New Chapter On Higher-level Plural Logic. The Project -- History -- Changing The Subject -- Predicative Analyses -- Terms - Singular And Plural -- The Indeterminacy Of Plural Denotation -- Some Basic Ideas Of Plural Logic -- Plural Descriptions -- Multivalued Functions -- Lists -- Singular Logic -- Mid-plural Logic -- Full Plural Logic -- Cantorian Set Theory -- Higher-level Plural Logic -- Postscript: Unfinished Business. Alex Oliver And Timothy Smiley. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 343-356) And Index.