The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org is running late today because I was a little disorganised yesterday and needed to get to work early enough today to reorganise, and that left insufficient time for it. Sorry about that – it’ll be up this evening.

Because “Syracuse”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/ uses frames everywhere on their website it’s hard to link to things directly. Which is too bad, because it makes it harder to link to things like Tom McKay’s very interesting looking book “Plurals and Non-Distributive Predication”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/mckay.html. Tom’s working through that material in a seminar this semester, and if my organisation skills improve I’ll be going to parts of it.

I have plans for a long post on some stuff related to the previous comments threads and focus and contextualism and kitchen sinks, but for now just one odd thing I noticed. I don’t know if this is an oddity about my idiolect, or it is more general. Compare the sentences in (1) and (2).

(1) a. At the final turn, Jack stopped running and jogged the rest of the way.
      b. Did she run to work or only jog?

(2) a. At the final turn, Jack stopped sprinting and ran the rest of the way.
      b. Did she sprint to work or only run?

In all four cases I can, by applying compositional rules, make sense of what is being asked or asserted. But while the sentences in (1) strike me as perfectly natural, the sentences in (2) strike me as rather odd. I don’t know if that’s everyone’s reaction to these.

I think what’s going on is the following. _Run_, like _knows_, picks out a property that is unbounded above. That is, you can’t go from running to not running by going faster, e.g. going into a sprint. And you can’t go from knowing to not knowing by getting better evidence, e.g. getting conclusive proof. And it seems odd (so I say on two cases) to take a stronger term and contrast the ‘unbounded above’ term with it. But maybe that isn’t what is going on, and maybe the fact that for Brian jogging is about as energetic as we ever get is affecting my reactions to these cases.