NON-SINGULAR REFERENCE : SOME PRELIMINARIES 1

One of the goals of a certain brand of philosopher has been to give an account of language and linguistic phenomena by means of showing how sentences are to be translated into a "logically perspicuous notation" (or an "ideal language"-to use pass~ terminology). The usual reason given by such philosophers for this activity is that such a notational system will somehow illustrate the "logical form" of these sentences. There are many candidates for this notational system: (almost)ordinary first-order predicate logic (see Quine [1960]), higher-order predicate logic (see Parsons to mention some of the more popular ones. I donor propose to discuss the general question of the correctness of this approach to the philosophy of language, nor do 1 wish to adjudi-cate among the notational systems mentioned here. Rather, I want to focus on one problem which must be faced by all such systems-a problem that must be discussed before one decides upon a notational system and tries to demontrate that it in fact can account for all linguistic phenomena. The general problem is to determine what we shall allow as linguistic data; in this paper I shall restrict my attention to this general problem as it appears when we try to account for certain words with non-singular reference, in particular, the words that are classified by the count/ mass and sortal/non-sortal distinctions. Nouns are normally divided into two classes: proper and common. Proper nouns themselves faU into two classes: those in one very rarely occtir with a determiner, and those in the other usually with 'the' (Connecticut is a state, The Connecticut is a river). 2 In the case of common nouns, there is general recognition that there are two quite distinct classes-at least "quite distinct" 451