Henry Laycock

My objective is a better comprehension of two theoretically fundamental concepts. One, the concept of a substance in an ordinary (non-Aristotelian) sense, ranging over such things as salt, carbon, copper, iron, water, and methane – kinds of stuff that now count as (chemical) elements and compounds. The other I’ll call the object-concept in the abstract sense of    Russell, Wittgenstein, and Frege in their logico-semantical enquiries. The material object-concept constitutes the heart of our received logico / ontic system, still massively influenced by Aristotle after almost 2.5 millennia. On such an account, the fundamentality of material objects and their attributes are the metaphysical basis of the cosmos, as reflected in our received logic, Quine’s ‘canonical notation’ – derived via the empiricism of Russell from Frege’s function-based Begriffschrifft, and consisting of concrete singular terms and variables, quantifiers and predicate-expressions. The inadequacy of Frege’s approach to understanding concepts is reflected in his initial question. Frege enquires of ‘what it is that we are calling an object’, remarking that he regards a regular definition as impossible: “we have here something too simple to admit of logical analysis”. The imagined ultimacy or simplicity of the idea of a single object (arithmetically, just a unit – one as against two, three, four, etc.) as foundational to the calculus is just that – imagined. It is also guaranteed to block the comprehension of the substance-concept.

Mereological entities often seem to violate ‘ordinary’ ideas of what a concrete object can be like, behaving more like sets than like Aristotelian substances. However, the mereological notions of ‘part’, ‘composition’, and ‘sum’ or ‘fusion’ appear to find concrete realisation in the actual semantics of mass nouns. Quine notes that ‘any sum of parts which are water is water’; and the wine from a single barrel can be distributed around the globe without affecting its identity. Is there here, as some have claimed, a ‘natural’ or ‘innocent’ form of mereology? The claim rests on the assumption that what a mass noun such as ‘wine’ denotes — the wine from a single barrel, for example — is indeed a unit of a special type, the sum or fusion of its many ‘parts’. The assumption is, however, open to question on semantic grounds.

Resolution of the problem of mass nouns depends on an expansion of our semantic/ontological taxonomy. Semantically, mass nouns are neither singular nor plural; they apply to neither just one object, nor to many objects, at a time. But their deepest kinship links them to the plural. A plural phrase — 'the cats in Kingston' — does not denote a single plural thing, but merely many distinct things. Just so, 'the water in the lake' does not denote a single aggregate — it is not ONE, but rather MUCH. The world is not the totality of singular objects, plural objects, and mass objects; for there are no plural or mass objects. It is the totality of single objects and (just) stuff.

A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects, distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It is however one of the main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space for "stuff" like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always ask "how many?," but with stuff the question has to be "how much?" Laycock's fascinating exploration also addresses key logical and linguistic questions about the way we categorize the many and the much.

The theory of surplus value contrasts ‘pay for labour power’ and ‘pay for labour services’. Unlike labour services but like all commodities, labour power has a specific economic value and it exchanges at this value. Unlike that of other commodities, the consumption of labour power results in the creation of more value than the commodity itself contains. Surplus value arises from the gap between the labour needed to sustain a day’s work, to keep the worker going for a day, and the labour performed in that same time. By the labour theory of value, the amount of labour needed to sustain a day’s work confers one value on the means of subsistence the worker requires, and thereby on the labour power the worker sells to her employer, whereas the day’s work itself confers another larger value on the product marketed by the employer.

So-called mass nouns, however precisely they are defined, are in any case a subset of non-count nouns. Count nouns are either singular or plural; to be non-count is hence to be neither singular nor plural. This is not, as such, a metaphysically significant contrast: 'pieces of furniture' is plural whereas 'furniture' itself is non-count. This contrast is simply between 'the many / few' and 'the much / little' - between counting and measuring. However not all non-count nouns are, like 'furniture', semantically atomic - 'wine' and 'water' are not. And here there are serious difficulties in the assignment of a range of values for variables, in a formal representation of quantified sentences involving such non-atomic non-count nouns.

Mills writes: G. A. Cohen's influential ‘technological determinist’ reading of Marx's theory of history rests in part on an interpretation of Marx's use of ‘material’ whose idiosyncrasy has been insufficiently noticed. Cohen takes historical materialism to be asserting the determination of the social by the material/asocial, viz. ‘socio‐neutral’ facts about human nature and human rationality which manifest themselves in a historical tendency for the forces of production to develop. This paper reviews Marx's writings to demonstrate the extensive textual evidence in favour of the traditional interpretation ‐ that for Marx, the ‘material’ includes the economic, and is thus ineluctably social in character. Thus those critics of Cohen who have urged the inclusion of the relations of production in historical materialism's explanans do seem to have Marx's terminological and conceptual backing.

In The Principles of Mathematics, Russell writes: Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. This, then, is the widest word in the philosophical vocabulary. I shall use as synonymous with it the words unit, individual and entity. The first two emphasize the fact that every term is one, while the third is derived from the fact that every term has being, i.e. is in some sense. A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term'. Now in this remark, a certain extremely general, topic-neutral use of ‘object’ is singled out, a use in which the expression is treated as equivalent to (equally neutral) uses of ‘term’, ‘entity’, ‘unit’, ‘individual’, and ‘thing’. In addition, a claim is made to the effect that the content of the expression, with its emphasis on one, is such as to be adequate to comprehend the sum-total of existence, to include whatever there may be. The paper addresses the question of what this claim means, and whether it might be true.

The theory of surplus value contrasts ‘pay for labour power’ and ‘pay for labour services’. Unlike labour services but like all commodities, labour power has a specific economic value and it exchanges at this value. Unlike that of other commodities, the consumption of labour power results in the creation of more value than the commodity itself contains. Surplus value arises from the gap between the labour needed to sustain a day’s work, to keep the worker going for a day, and the labour performed in that same time. By the labour theory of value, the amount of labour needed to sustain a day’s work confers one value on the means of subsistence the worker requires, and thereby on the labour power the worker sells to her employer, whereas the day’s work itself confers another larger value on the product marketed by the employer.