Words that denote things (including people and other animate beings) and substances are nouns, e.g. house and water. This is not to say that all nouns denote things and substances. Our language encourages us to treat many abstract concepts in the same way as we treat things and substances. Thus we can say three tries and not much patience. But it would surely be circular to say that a try must be a ‘thing’ and that patience must be a ‘substance’ because the words that refer to them are nouns. All we can say is that, in general, the noun is the class of words that is used to denote things and substances. The difference between countable and uncountable nouns is based upon the physical difference between things and substances. Things are separate, distinct and enduring; substances can be cast into a variety of shapes. Chairs and houses must keep their distinctive form in order to be recognizable; butter, iron and water can be fashioned and moulded. This is all very well for chairs and butter, but as a classification of our experience of the world it is simplistic. Thus there are many kinds of denotation, which, if they are to be squeezed into this framework, will have to be treated arbitrarily. For instance, why should wheat be uncountable, while oats and peas are countable? A large body of small objects is fluid, but each small object is stable, so either way of seeing it would do. Many things can be viewed in either of two ways, both of which would make
sense; a cabbage is a stable object while it is growing, but when it has been cooked it is more readily seen as a substance (I have bought two cabbages; Would you like a little more cabbage?). If this is true of some kinds of concrete objects, how much more true is it of abstractions like thought, admiration and deception? Thought denotes both an activity and an isolatable item in a thinking programme: He spends many hours in thought, and then he puts his thoughts on paper. This is so unpredictable a feature of the English language that it is understandable that foreigners learning English should find it difficult. Thus a student writes: *Road accident is the main cause of heavy expenditure. How is he to know that accident is countable? After all, luck is uncountable. Another student writes: *To avoid a terrible damage, to the town [the authorities] passed a bye-law which…. The error lies in treating damage as a countable noun. But supposing the required word had been threat, which is not very different, then the determiner would have been necessary: To avoid a terrible threat to the town…. Although it seems that we cannot establish a common feature of denotation that applies to all nouns, at least we can say that they are all suitable for referring to topics that we may want to talk about. Thus they have a rhetorical feature in common. We can say The bus hit a tree, or His industriousness caused resentment. Here we are talking about ‘the bus’, ‘a tree’, ‘his industriousness’ and ‘resentment’, all of which are possible topics of discourse. The process of topicalizing abstract conceptions like resentment and industriousness is called reification: ‘talking about abstractions as though they were things’. This may have dangers of which the philosopher is acutely aware, but it is the way the English language enables its speakers to extend the scope of their discourse beyond reference to concrete objects. Here is a list of nouns taken from about a dozen lines of a text dealing with the history of ideas in the seventeenth century: date, waning, view, nature, man, replacement, humanist, culture, extent, Renaissance, process, century, day, times, orthodoxy, prosperity, stability, civilization, distinction, supernature, doctrine, grace, sin. All of these have a more or less abstract denotation. Nouns are also used for systems of classification. Fields of activity like commerce, medicine, motor-car maintenance, law, and artistic print-making require that we should distinguish categories of the things we talk about. For instance, talk about print-making requires categories of materials, tools, techniques and products. Some of the words exist only in discourse about this field, and all of the words have meanings that are specialized to it. In a book on ‘original prints’ the following specialist vocabulary was found. All of the expressions listed are nouns (including some noun-like ing-forms, see p. 44), or are based upon a noun head: lithodrawing ink, watercolour wash, backing sheet, graver, spitsticker, scorper, burin, mezzotint, aquatint, copperplate, gravure, hard ground etching, wood-cut, lino-cut, lavis, pochoir, photostencil, photo-etching, needling, burnishing, collograph, collotype, lithograph, plate lithography, stone lithography, transfer lithography, relief print, screenprint, intaglio print. From what has been said it does not follow that all specialist vocabulary consists of nouns; the book on prints includes verbs like etch, and adjectives like lithographic. But the nouns usually provide the majority of the special terms used in the field. In our age of science and technology new systems of classification are continually being created, usually through nouns that name
the categories required.