期刊名称：Hyle : International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry
印刷版ISSN：1433-5158
出版年度：2007
卷号：13
期号：1
页码：63-65
出版社：HYLE Publications, Karlsruhe and University of Karlsruhe
摘要：The title of this book is a play on W. V. Quine's Word and Object, a major pub-lication from 1960 in the philosophy of language. It is a critical study of the se-mantics of non-count nouns (NCNs) as discussed by Russell, Strawson, Quine and other less prominent philosophers of language. NCNs include mass terms, which have some bearing on the cate-gory of stuff or matter, and which is where the book touches the interests of readers of this journal. The book claims to address the ontology of stuff on the understanding that "it is precisely in the semantics of these nouns that the key to understanding this ontology is found" (p. ix), although it soon transpires that metaphysics does the lion's share of the work. The author's central thesis is that NCNs are non-singular, which he re-flects in the contrast his title makes with Quine's. But the magnitude of the task is such that "an enquiry of this [book's] length cannot be anything but programmatic" (p. xii), and readers hop-ing for a systematic positive contribu-tion to the ontology of stuff will be disappointed. Similar reasons are given for making few inroads into the vast literature in linguistics bearing on these issues. But the author doesn't comment on the more remarkable absence, in view of the subtitle, of any serious con-sideration of logical investigations into these matters
