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 data. We assume that an account of individuation can and should be given, and then the main question we pose is ‘What minimal extensions to classical mereology are required to account for mass/count variation data?’ We do this in order to clear the decks of some of the complications involved in the semantics of the mass/count distinction. We conclude that, minimally, two dimensions of context sensitivity need to be incorporated into a mereological semantics. The first is to formally remove overlap from an overlapping set of individuated entities, the second is to model how a set of individuated entities can sometimes be taken as a counting base despite not being minimal with respect to the whole noun’s denotation.