History
The view is commonly associated with George Boolos, though it is older (see notably Simons 1982), and is related to the view of classes defended by John Stuart Mill and other nominalist philosophers. Mill argued that universals or "classes" are not a peculiar kind of thing, having an objective existence distinct from the individual objects that fall under them, but "is neither more nor less than the individual things in the class". (Mill 1904, II. ii. 2,also I. iv. 3).
A similar position was also discussed by Bertrand Russell in chapter VI of Russell (1903), but later dropped in favour of a "no-classes" theory. See also Gottlob Frege 1895 for a critique of an earlier view defended by Ernst Schroeder.
The general idea can be traced back to Leibniz. (Levey 2011, pp. 129-133)
Interest revived in plurals with work in linguistics in the 1970s by Remko Scha, Godehard Link, Fred Landman, Roger Schwarzschild, Peter Lasersohn and others, who developed ideas for a semantics of plurals.
Read more about this topic: Plural Quantification
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)