My main research interests are in issues that cut across metaphysics and philosophy of language, logic and philosophy of mathematics. I also have interests in philosophy of science, decision theory, history of philosophy, and semantics of Korean.
My main work concerns the proper understanding of many things as such (e.g. Russell and Whitehead, or Watson and Crick) and expressions we use to talk about them, such as plural constructions of English (e.g. “Russell and Whitehead”, “the authors of Principia Mathematica”, or “Watson and Crick”). In doing so, I challenge what I call the bias for singularity that permeates contemporary understandings of language, thought, and reality, and articulate and defend a liberal conception not constrained by the bias. Thus I argue that we can, and must, understand plural constructions on their own terms without reducing them to singular constructions and that there are plural properties (e.g., being two humans, writing Principia Mathematica, or discovering the structure of DNA), which can be instantiated by many things as such. And I develop a logical system, the logic of plurals, that helps to clarify logical relations among plural constructions, and defend the view that natural numbers (e.g. the number two) are plural properties (e.g. being two things).
I am also working on the nature of stuffs and the semantics of mass nouns. I think that the primary function of some of the mass nouns (e.g., ‘water’) is to refer to a stuff (e.g., water), and that each stuff is a particular that typically has a scattered existence. The predicative use of those mass nouns, on my view, is reducible to their primary use as singular terms; accordingly, our understanding of parts or portions of a stuff (e.g., the water in Lake Ontario) rests on our understanding of the stuff itself, just as our understanding of organic parts of an organism depends on our understanding of the organism itself. And I think that mass nouns (or some of them, nouns for stuffs) differ fundamentally from count nouns. I think that the distinction between mass and count nouns, or an analogue thereof, pace many linguists and philosophers (e.g., Quine, Hanson, Krifka, and Chierchia), can be found in the so called classifier languages (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) as well. This helps to show that the distinction has an underlying basis that manifests itself, in different forms, in a wide variety of human languages. The underlying basis, on my view, is the distinction between amount (or quantity) and number, or between measuring and counting, a distinction that manifests itself as that between the two different roles of ‘thirty’ in ‘thirty gallons of milk’ and ‘thirty cows’.
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