Mass Nouns and Plural Logic

According to singularism, ‘the students’ refers to a single collective entity, e.g. a sum or set. In contrast, according to pluralism, ‘the students’ plurally refers to multiple students at once, through the primitive relation of plural reference. Although it was originally designed exclusively for plural nouns, this paper addresses whether plural reference can be extended so as to provide an empirically adequate semantics for mass nouns, such as ‘the furniture’, as well, as certain pluralists have maintained. Our contention is that extant pluralist analyses of mass nouns suffer from two major setbacks. First, while they may or may not explain the semantic commonalities between plural and mass nouns, they do not explain their semantic differences. Secondly, pluralism is inconsistent with the possibility that mass nouns are gunky, i.e. fail to have atomic parts. However, we provide three kinds of semantic arguments showing that the gunkiness of at least some mass nouns is not only possible, but plausible.