Wiggins' Hidden Principle of Individuation

Response to Geraint Wiggins

Running Head: INDIVIDUATION REDUCES PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR The hidden cost of humanization: Individuation reduces prosocial behavior toward ingroup members

The Individuation of Tropes

A trope is a particular property: the redness of a rose, the roundness of the moon. It is generally supposed that tropes are individuated by primitive quantity: this redness, that roundness. I argue that the trope theorist is far better served by individuating tropes by spatiotemporal relation: here redness, there roundness. In short, tropes are not this-suches but here-suches. I generally favo...

Countability: Individuation and Context

We agree with recent countability research that a satisfactory account of individuation in terms of what counts as ‘one’ unit for counting is highly relevant for characterizing a semantics of the mass/count distinction. However, we argue that an account that rests on individuation alone does not suffice to cover all the relevant mass/count data, in particular the puzzling mass/count variation d...

Individuation and Quantification

Chris Barker Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego Judging from the way people talk, the number of entities in a given situation that get recognized as distinct individuals seems to depend on the specific communicative goals of a particular discourse. Admitting that semantic interpretation needs to provide a limited degree of ontological variability can resolve some emp...