Sortal Concepts Research Articles

A three-way distinction in definiteness: sortal, individual, and functional concepts in Réyoné

Abstract This article offers a case study of a definiteness split in a language in which three different types of nominal expressions are available for definite descriptions. The article contributes ample empirical data and comprises a close investigation of the patterns found in Reunion Creole (Réyoné), the language under study. Réyoné displays one kind of contrast also found in other languages which is frequently analyzed in terms of semantic versus pragmatic definiteness (following Löbner) or uniqueness versus familiarity (following Schwarz). What sets Réyoné apart from other languages though, is that it features a determiner that is dedicated to functional concepts. The language thereby distinguishes individual from functional concepts: the former type (the sun; the News) is exclusively expressed by bare noun phrases, while functional concepts – definite descriptions with functional head nouns (prefect of y; head of y), including a subtype of bridging reference, as well as compositionally created functional relations such as superlatives – are realized by lo-marked noun phrases. These facts offer strong support for Löbner’s theory. The article also discusses demonstrative descriptions, which have already been reported to play a role in certain definiteness splits, and which are obligatory with sortal concepts in Réyoné. It is argued that demonstratives are pragmatic definites.

The Dichotomy of Male and Female in the Context of theDistinction between Domestic and Foreign Policy in the Philosophy of Socrates

One of the main trends in the development of the modern world is globalization, a process the explanation of which often prompts representatives of one well-known parascientific movement to think about a worldwide conspiracy. Although the methods and goals of the above specialists are constantly criticized by “normal” academic science representatives, it is necessary to recognize the validity of some of their considerations. How else can we explain the blurring of boundaries between nations, languages, and cultures, if not by the orientation and controllability of these processes? In modern times, the borders between the sexes are also getting erased. Male and female beginnings are increasingly rarely presented as sortal concepts. Now, they are only non-exclusive qualities inherent in all people in different proportions if we believe in Western science. Even in modern times, politics is undergoing changes. Its vectors change, and new relations between power structures are created.

The Sortal Concept in the Context of Biomedical Record Linkage.

Biomedical Record Linkage is especially designed for linking data of patients in different data repositories. An important question in this context is whether singling-out is sufficient for identifying a patient, and if not, what is in general required for identification. To provide hints for an answer, we will extend previous works on the concept of identity and extend the sortal concept, stemming from analytical philosophy and upper-level ontologies. A sortal is a concept that is associated with an identity criterion. For example, the concept "set" has the identity criterion "having the same members". Based on a description of a record linkage setting, we operationalize the sortal concept by providing a distinction between the digital representation of a person (d-sortal) and the person in flesh (b-sortal).

Predication and sortal concepts

We shall distinguish between sortal predication and standard predication. The former kind of predication necessarily involves sortal concepts but the latter, as it is customarily viewed, does not. It is generally thought that the only essential occurrence of a concept in a standard predication is the concept being predicated. In this paper, we shall put forward an alternative view. We shall propose to understand standard predication as a cognitive act essentially requiring sortal concepts. We shall call this view conceptual predication sortalism and ground it on the basis of epistemic-semantic reasons. Concepts are understood as intersubjectively realizable capacities or abilities that fulfill particular cognitive roles, such as those of classification, categorization, individuation, and referring.

Psychological verbs and their arguments

In this paper it is argued that objects of subject experiencer psychological verbs do not have kind reference, but rather refer to individual object entities: specific individuals, generic plurals, and even entity correlates of a property. We argue that objects of transitive subject experiencer psychological verbs must refer to atoms or sums of atoms, because they presuppose the existence of the Target-of-Emotion. Focusing mainly on data from various Romance languages and Russian, we also argue that the Target-of-emotion of psychological verbs such as odiar ‘hate’ cannot refer to a kind entity, conceived as an abstract individual or an abstract sortal concept, but instead can refer to a maximal sum of individual entities, instantiated through a generic plural.

In Defense of Brain Death: Replies to Don Marquis, Michael Nair-Collins, Doyen Nguyen, and Laura Specker Sullivan

In this paper, I defend brain death as a criterion for determining death against objections raised by Don Marquis, Michael Nair-Collins, Doyen Nguyen, and Laura Specker Sullivan. I argue that any definition of death for beings like us relies on some sortal concept by which we are individuated and identified and that the choice of that concept in a practical context is not determined by strictly biological considerations but involves metaphysical, moral, social, and cultural considerations. This view supports acceptance of a more pluralistic legal definition of death as well as acceptance of brain death as death.

Defining Death: Beyond Biology

The debate over whether brain death is death has focused on whether individuals who have sustained total brain failure have satisfied the biological definition of death as “the irreversible loss of the integration of the organism as a whole.” In this paper, I argue that what it means for an organism to be integrated “as a whole” is undefined and vague in the views of those who attempt to define death as the irreversible loss of the integration of the organism as a whole. I show how what it means for a living thing to be integrated as a whole depends on the sortal (kind) concept by which it is identified. Since interests, values, and ontological considerations besides strictly biological ones affect the concepts by which we individuate and identify living things, those non-biological considerations have a bearing on what it means for a particular kind of living thing to exist as a whole and thus what it means for one of us to die. Even if our bodies may remain organically integrated in some sense despite total brain failure, this fact should not lead us to reject brain death as death. Artificially sustained brain-dead human bodies are not human beings, but the remains of them. While such bodies may be alive in some sense, they are not human beings or human persons. They are not one of us.

Identity and Sortals (and Caesar)

According to the sortal conception of the universe of individuals every individual falls under a highest sortal, or category. It is argued here that on this conception the identity relation is defined between individuals a and b if and only if a and b fall under a common category. Identity must therefore be regarded as a relation of the form \(x=_{Z}y\), with three arguments x, y, and Z, where Z ranges over categories, and where the range of x and y depends on the value of Z. An identity relation of this kind can be made good sense of in Martin-Lof’s type theory. But identity so construed requires a reformulation of Hume’s Principle that makes this principle unfit for explaining the sortal concept of cardinal number. The Neo-Logicist can therefore not appeal to the sortal conception in tackling the Julius Caesar problem, as proposed by Hale and Wright (The reason’s proper study. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 335–396, 2001b).

Identifying and counting objects: The role of sortal concepts

Sortal terms, such as table or horse, are nouns akin to basic-level terms. According to some theories, the meaning of sortals provides conditions for telling objects apart (individuating objects, e.g., telling one table from a second) and for identifying objects over time (e.g., determining that a particular table at one time is the same table at another). A number of psychologists have proposed that sortal concepts likewise provide psychologically real conditions for individuating and identifying things. However, this paper reports five experiments that cast doubt on these psychological claims. Experiments 1–3 suggest that sortal concepts do not determine when an object ceases to exist and therefore do not decide when the object can no longer be identical to a later one. Experiments4–5 similarly suggest that sortal concepts do not provide determinate conditions for individuating objects. For example, they do not always decide whether a room contains one table or two. All five experiments feature ordinary objects undergoing ordinary changes.

Logicism Beyond Principia Mathematica

82 Reviews c:\users\arlene\documents\rj issues\type3501\rj 3501 061 red.docx 2015-07-10 4:07 PM LOGICISM BEYOND PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA Chris Pincock Philosophy / Ohio State U. Columbus, oh 43210–1365, usa pincock.1@osu.edu William Demopoulos. Logicism and Its Philosophical Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2013. Pp. xii, 272. isbn: 9781107029804.£60.00; us$104.99 (hb). his book brings together eight previously published essays along with three new essays and a brief introduction. In one way or another, each essay pursues either logicism or some broader implication of logicism that a major figure like Russell or Carnap explored. In a narrow sense, logicism is just the position that grounds the concepts and claims of arithmetic (or all of mathematics) in logic. However, in Demopoulos’ hands, logicism becomes a project of much greater significance. A note added to Chapter 5, the classic 1985 article “Bertrand Russell’s The Analysis of Matter” (co-authored with Michael Friedman), indicates this broader scope and Demopoulos’ own take on logicism. Originally Demopoulos and Friedman had concluded their article with both the observation that there are serious “intellectual tensions produced by logicism’s attempt to account for both pure mathematics and applied mathematics (mathematical physics)” and the pessimistic conclusion that “it appears that we can account for the distinctive character of the one only at the expense of the other” (p. 107). Now Demopoulos indicates that even though “something close to [this] is true of Carnap’s Ramsey-sentence q= Reviews 83 c:\users\arlene\documents\rj issues\type3501\rj 3501 061 red.docx 2015-07-10 4:07 PM reconstruction of the language of science”, “the four previous chapters are an extended argument against” the earlier conjecture. For Demopoulos, the main problem is to make sense of both pure and applied mathematics in something like the original logicist form found in Frege, Russell and Carnap.The solution to this problem arises only when we have pinpointed exactly where these logicist projects failed and how their failures can be overcome. Chapter 1 focuses on Frege and his logicism for arithmetic. Demopoulos’ main contention is that Frege aims to reduce arithmetic to logic in order to demonstrate the autonomy of arithmetic from geometric intuition and empirical experience. Frege’s worry about intuition is not motivated by scepticism or by a concern about the cogency of our knowledge of arithmetic (p. 11).The point of logicism is to free arithmetic from the obscurity associated with intuition and to get a clearer grasp of the generality that is characteristic of arithmetic . (Chapters 8 and 9 develop this point in more detail and use it to motivate a brand of logicism for arithmetic that is taken to improve on current neo-Fregean approaches.) For this reason Hume’s Principle takes a central role in Frege’s reconstruction of arithmetic for it not only establishes the autonomy of arithmetic, but also secures the core use of arithmetic in application , i.e. in counting (p. 19). Unlike Dummett and other commentators Demopoulos does not think that this aspect of Frege’s logicism is flawed. Instead, flaws arise only with the accounts of applied mathematics offered by later figures like Russell and Carnap.The root of these problems is that they extend a particular logicist strategy to other areas of mathematics, such as geometry, and to our scientific knowledge more generally. Chapter 2 considers “Carnap’sThesis”, which Demopoulos summarizes as “the assertion that certain applied mathematical theories are not factual” (p. 28). Although the thesis is clearly central to Carnap throughout his career, Demopoulos ultimately argues for a non-Carnapian basis for the factual/nonfactual distinction.The root of the difference is the kind of criteria of identity that are appropriate for the objects at the heart of the theory: … the factuality of an applied mathematical theory will be shown to turn on the recognition that the criteria of identity appropriate to its objects are empirically constrained in a way that the criteria of identity appropriate to the objects of a nonfactual theory are not. (P. 28) For arithmetic, the natural numbers associated with two sortal concepts are identical just in case the objects that...

Singular thought: object-files, person-files, and the sortal PERSON.

In philosophy, "singular thought" refers to our capacity to represent entities as individuals, rather than as possessors of properties. Philosophers who defend singularism argue that perception allows us to mentally latch onto objects and persons directly, without conceptualizing them as being of a certain sort. Singularists assume that singular thought forms a unified psychological kind, regardless of the nature of the individuals represented. Empirical findings on the special psychological role of persons as opposed to inanimates threaten singularism. They raise the possibility that tracking individuals specifically as persons might require conceptualizing them in certain ways, for example, as persons. In this paper, we take such a possibility seriously but ultimately reject it. Instead, we propose to revise a prominent singularist theory, the theory of mental files, in order to accommodate data on the psychological distinctiveness of persons: We advocate the postulation of perceptual person-files. Perceptual tracking via person-files is different from object-tracking but also from descriptive classification under the sortal concept PERSON.

The sortal resemblance problem

Is it possible to characterize the sortal essence of Fs for a sortal concept F solely in terms of a criterion of identity C for F? That is, can the question ‘What sort of thing are Fs?’ be answered by saying that Fs are essentially those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of C? This paper presents a case study supporting a negative answer to these questions by critically examining the neo-Fregean suggestion that cardinal numbers can be fully characterized as those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of one-one correspondence between concepts.

Sorting Out the Sortals: A Fregean Argument for Essentialism

In his paper, “Identity Statements and Essentialism,” Loux (New Scholast 44:431–439, 1971) seeks to demonstrate sortal essentialism based on Frege’s thesis that all statements of number concerning a collection require that the members fall under the same sortal concept. I shall attempt to argue that a detailed analysis of Loux’s argument reveals it as failing to imply the type of sortal dependency thesis necessary for the justification of sortal essentialism. However, if one construes the transworld identity relation as no different from our run of the mill identity relation, then his argument can serve as the basis for a proof of a type of nontrivial essentialism, thereby showing that the possible worlds picture of modality is indeed committed to a robust essentialism.

Sortal concepts and pragmatic inference in children’s early quantification of objects

It is typically assumed that count nouns like fork act as logical sortals, specifying whether objects are countable units of a kind (e.g., that a whole fork counts as “one fork”) or not (e.g., that a piece of a fork does not count as “one fork”). In four experiments, we provide evidence from linguistic and conceptual development that nouns do not specify units of quantification, but include both whole objects and their arbitrary parts in their denotations. We argue that, to restrict quantification to whole objects, nominal concepts are enriched pragmatically, via contrast with concepts denoted by alternative descriptions: a piece of a fork is not counted as “one fork” because it is “one piece of fork.” Experiment 1 replicated previous findings that children count pieces of broken objects as whole objects (e.g., two pieces of fork as “two forks”), and showed that children also accept whole object labels as descriptions of object pieces (e.g., “two forks” to describe two pieces of fork). Experiment 2 showed that although children accept such descriptions in isolation, they prefer measure phrases (e.g., “two pieces of fork”) when they are explicitly presented as alternatives. Experiment 3 found that children were better at excluding pieces from their counts of whole objects when measure phrases were primed prior to counting, making them accessible as alternatives to whole object labels. Finally, Experiment 4 taught children names for novel objects, and found that they do not count parts that are given unique labels or that have non-linguistic properties that suggest they are members of distinct object kinds (e.g., unique functions or physical affordances). Together, our results suggest that for children and adults alike, nominal concepts do not provide necessary and sufficient criteria for excluding parts from object kinds. To specify units of quantification – and do the work of sortals – concepts are contrasted with one another and enriched pragmatically.

Moderate Monism, Sortal Concepts, and Relative Identity

Coincidence (e.g., of a statue and the piece of bronze which constitutes it) comes in two varieties - permanent and temporary. Moderate monism (about coincidence) is the position that permanent coincidence, but not temporary coincidence, entails identity. Extreme monism (a version of which is stage theory (Sider 2001, Hawley 2001)) is the position that even temporary coincidence entails identity (those who deny that there are merely temporary coincidents are another sort of extreme monist, I shall not be considering this position in this paper).' Pluralists are opponents of monism tout court.2 The intuitively obvious, commonsensical position (= my own position) is moderate monism. It is therefore important to see if it can be sustained.I first outline the moderate monist position and compare and contrast it with other metaphysical positions with which it is often associated. I then indicate the arguments for moderate monism that seem to me most persuasive, drawing on earlier work of my own (Noonan 1993) and Johnston (1992). Next I turn to three criticisms of moderate monism, by Jim Stone (2005a; 2005c), Eric Olson (2006; 2007) and Penelope Mackie (2008 and unpublished). In responding to these criticisms I maintain (a) that sortal concepts satisfy de dicto modal principles that constrain the histories and spatiotemporal surroundings of the things falling under them and that may be thought of as specifying their criteria of identity, (b) that a distinction is required between restricted sortal quantification and unrestricted quantification over the things falling under a sortal concept (between e.g., 'some statue is . . .' and 'something is a statue and is . . .') and (c) that reflecting on the arguments which enforce this distinction provides the best ground for accepting that 'identity is relative' in one sense familiar from the writings of Peter Geach (1980), namely that identity under a sortal concept at a time (expressible in the form 'is the same S as at i') does not entail absolute, Leibnizian identity. I shall suggest that one way (not the only way) of combining these ideas is to defend a variant of stage theory which is a sort of synthesis of some of the ideas of Hawley (2001) and Sider (2001), but does not depart so far from standard perdurantism and which yields a variant on moderate monism which may be thought of as moderately extreme monism (see Noonan 1976).II begin by outlining the moderate monist position. According to the moderate monist if God creates ex nihilo (at ti) a bronze statue and later (at tlO) annihilates it, destroying both the statue and the bronze of which it is composed (so we have a case of permanent coincidence - Scenario I), the statue and the piece of bronze are identical. If, however, God simply radically reshapes the bronze at tlO (so that we have a case of same-origin temporary coincidence, as Mackie [2008] calls it - Scenario II), the statue ceases to exist and the piece of bronze survives, so despite their coincidence up to tlO the statue and the piece of bronze are two things.Since the statue in Scenario I could not have been radically reshaped without being destroyed, but the piece of bronze in Scenario I could, to conform to Leibniz's Law the moderate monist must accept that modal predication is 'Abelardian' (Noonan 1991), so that the reference of, e.g., 'could have been radically reshaped without being destroyed' is different when attached to 'the statue' and 'the piece of bronze'. One way of fleshing this out is to give a Lewisean counterpart-theoretic account of modal predication, according to which 'could have been radically reshaped without being destroyed' stands for the property has a statue counterpart which is radically reshaped and not destroyed when attached to 'the statue', but stands for the property has apiece of bronze counterpart which is radically reshaped but not destroyed when attached to 'the piece of bronze'. However, acceptance of the Abelardian character of modal predication, which is obligatory for the moderate monist (and the stage theorist) - unless, of course, he endorses a comprehensive Quinean scepticism about any grade of modal involvement beyond modality de dicto - does not require acceptance of Lewisean counterpart theory, or a fortiori, of Lewisean modal realism (see Gupta 1980). …

Fourteen-month-old infants infer the continuous identity of objects on the basis of nonvisible causal properties.

Research on object cognition in infancy suggests that children from (at latest) 1 year of age are capable of individuating objects according to property/kind information. It remains unclear from previous work, however, whether infants in such studies truly apply sortal (kind) concepts or whether they merely track objects on the basis of superficial surface features. To clarify this question, we examined infants' flexibility in tracking property changes. In particular, we investigated which property changes infants see as diagnostic for kind changes and whether they can dynamically adapt this view as a function of prior knowledge. Fourteen-month-old infants were presented with a salient property transformation indicating a category change (i.e., a rabbit was placed in a box but a carrot was retrieved from it). Prior to the test, half of the infants saw how a stuffed animal could be transformed into another object by a simple mechanism. The other infants were unaware of this transformation. Only infants of the naive group interpreted the property change observed in the subsequent test as diagnostic for a change in identity and thus expected two objects to be present in the box. The results are discussed in the light of psychological essentialism, which can explain why infants treat some classes of property changes but not others as diagnostic for changes in identity.

Guest Editors' Preface

This volume brings together three contributions to the 2007 conference on ‘Concept Types and Frames’ held in Düsseldorf in August 2007 (CTF07).1 The conference was a broad interdisciplinary meeting attended by scholars from the fields of semantics, computational linguistics, philosophy, psychology, neurology and other areas. Its aim was to bring together these disciplines to jointly contribute to a very ambitious enterprise: a general theory of concepts in human cognition. At the heart of the approach taken is an attempt to link up Barsalou’s theory of frames (Barsalou 1992) with perspectives of linguistic semantics. Barsalou’s theory of frames is a theory of the cognitive representation of sortal concepts (of logical type <e,t>); the same holds for almost all other theories of concepts, from Aristotle’s, over binary feature models, to prototype theory. A frame describes a category of objects in terms of the attributes these objects exhibit, and the type of values which each of the attributes may take. The attributes are functions that relate unique values to the bearer of the attribute. A good illustration of a frame-format description of an object is the way in which the holder of a passport is described by the personal data in the document: ‘name’, ‘date of birth’, ‘place of birth’, ‘height’, ‘sex’ are attributes, that is functions that are generally defined in the domain of persons and return a unique value for every possible argument. The respective entries in a passport are the values which these functions take for the bearer of the passport. Frame descriptions in terms of attributes and values are recursive: the values of attributes can themselves be described by their own attributes and the values they take.

Relative Identity and the Number of Artifacts

Relativists maintain that identity is always relative to a general term (RI). According to them, the notion of absolute identity has to be abandoned and replaced by a multiplicity of relative identity relations for which Leibniz’s Law does not hold. For relativists RI is at least as good as the Fregean cardinality thesis (FC), which contends that an ascription of cardinality is always relative to a concept specifying what, in any specific case, counts as a unit. The same train of thought on cardinality and identity is apparent among those – Artifactualists – who take relative identity sentences for artifacts as the norm. The aim of this paper is (i) to criticize the thesis (T1) thatfrom FC it is possible to derive RI, and (ii) to explain why Artifactualists mistakenly believe that RI can be derived from FC. The misunderstanding derives from their assumption that the concept of artifact – like the concept of object – is not a sortal concept.

Reference, perception, and attention

I examine John Campbell’s claim that the determination of the reference of a perceptual demonstrative requires conscious visual object-based selective attention. I argue that although Campbell’s claim to the effect that, first, a complex binding parameter is needed to establish the referent of a perceptual demonstrative, and, second, that this referent is determined independently of, and before, the application of sortals is correct, this binding parameter does not require object-based attention for its construction. If object-based attention were indeed required then the determination of the referent would necessarily involve the application of sortal concepts, since object-based attention initiates top-down cognitive effects on visual processing. I also examine Mohan Matthen’s claim that reference to objects is established only through the visual processing in the dorsal visual stream and argue that although it is true that processing in the dorsal stream can determine reference, a thesis that goes against Campbell’s view that the determination of the referent requires conscious attention, processing along the ventral visual stream can also establish the reference of perceptual demonstratives. It also claim that Matthen’s account of dorsal processing underestimates the kind of information processed along the dorsal stream and this has some implications regarding perceptual demonstratives reference fixing.

The Paradox of Coincidence and Sortal Concepts

The paradox of coincidence, a paradox about the relation between a material object and its stuff, has been paid a great attention to in recent metaphysics. In this paper, I compare two influential approaches to this paradox; sortalism and fourdimensional worm theory, and defend sortalism. I give the following two arguments. (1) Worm theory, like sortalism, must introduce sortal concepts to resolve the paradox. So both approaches owe the (almost) same theoretical burden to explain how sortal concepts work. (2) Worm theory, unlike sortalism, introduces sortal concepts in a very problematic way.