criticism of shafeism plurality

Criticism of Benacerraf’s Criticism of Modern Eleatics

I analyze here Benacerraf’s criticism of Thomson arguments on the impossibility of ω-supertasks. Although Benacerraf’s criticism is well founded, his analysis of Thomson’s lamp is incomplete. In fact, it is possible to consider a new line of argument, which Benacerraf only incidentally considered, based on the functioning laws of the lamp. This argument leads to a contradictory result that comp...

The Art of Criticism? Criticism as Art!

1 Plurality

Although there is striking variation across languages (and even within a single language) in how the plural is formally expressed, it is relatively easy to indicate what plurality is from a morphological point of view: the plural is one of the instances of the inflectional category of number. From a semantic point of view, however, the concept of plurality is much more di↵use. To start with, th...

Encapsulating Plurality

This paper describes the Gaggle, a mechanism for grouping and naming objects in an object-oriented distributed system. Using Gaggles, client objects can access distributed replicated services without regard for the number of objects that provide the service. Gaggles are not themselves a replication mechanism; instead they enable programmers to construct their own replicated distributed services...

Simple plurality versus plurality runoff with privately informed voters

This paper compares two voting methods commonly used in presidential elections: simple plurality voting and plurality runoff. In a situation in which a group of voters have common interests but do not agree on which candidate to support due to private information, information aggregation requires them to split their support between their favorite candidates. However, if a group of voters split ...

Maximality and Plurality

This paper investigates the notion of the maximality effect and its formal implementation. It will be shown that the maximal witness sets that an anaphor can access are sensitive to the plural readings of the anaphor’s antecedents. It will also be shown that the formal semantics of the maximality effect should not be implemented on the interpretation of either determiners or anaphors. Instead, ...