Plural quantification

In mathematics and logic, plural quantification is the theory that an individual variable x may take on plural, as well as singular, values. As well as substituting individual objects such as Alice, the number 1, the tallest building in London etc. for x, we may substitute both Alice and Bob, or all the numbers between 0 and 10, or all the buildings in London over 20 stories. The point of the theory is to give first-order logic the power of set theory, but without any "existential commitment" to such objects as sets. The classic expositions are Boolos 1984 and Lewis 1991. 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, Friederike Moltmann, Roger Schwarzschild, Peter Lasersohn and others, who developed ideas for a semantics of plurals. Sentences like Alice and Bob cooperate. Alice, Bob and Carol cooperate. are said to involve a multigrade (also known as variably polyadic, also anadic) predicate or relation ("cooperate" in this example), meaning that they stand for the same concept even though they don't have a fixed arity (cf. Linnebo & Nicolas 2008). The notion of multigrade relation/predicate has appeared as early as the 1940s and has been notably used by Quine (cf. Morton 1975).