Extensional and Intensional Collectives and the De re / De dicto Distinction
Antony Galton
and
Zena Wood
In Applied Ontology, Volume 11, 2016, pages 205-226.
DOI 10.3233/AO-160168
Abstract
Expressions designating collectives, such as "the committee" or
"the ships in the port", may be interpreted de re or
de dicto, depending on context, according as they pick out
collectives defined by their members or collectives defined by some
criterion for membership. We call these E(xtensional)-collectives
and I(ntensional)-collectives respectively, and in this paper we
explore in depth the relationship between these two categories. In
particular, we identify important respects in which they differ,
regarding the nature of the dependence of the collective on its
members, the nature of the parthood relation in which the members
stand to the whole, and, from an application perspective, the
different methods used for identifying the two forms of collective
from large spatio-temporal data-sets.
Antony Galton