His interpretation spells out the truth clauses for the second-order quantifiers in terms of plural expressions, without invoking classes.
Both mass and plural expressions take the definite article since 'the' "does not discriminate between singular and plural" (Laycock 2006, p. 35).
On this type of approach, neither the concept of the many, nor the use of plural expressions, calls for modification to the doctrine that whatever is, is one.
If this is so, and mass expressions are plural expressions, then mass expressions can be accounted for in a relatively well understood and uncontroversial logic which accounts for a wider range of commonsense inferences than standard logic does.
It's not clear why both water and lions get a plural reference treatment, yet the referents of mass expressions get to retain some kind of ontological halo which distinguishes their referents from non-mass plural expressions.
For to say that a sentence incurs a commitment to a plural entity is just to say that the truth of the sentence requires there to be some semantic value of the sort appropriate to plural expressions.
According to the Fregean tradition, which connects the notion of ontological commitment to that of a semantic value, this will mean that plural expressions incur commitment to plural entities, much as predicates incur commitment to concepts.
Some 'pluralists', as we may call those who analyze mass expressions in terms of plural expressions, hold that mass terms are used, generally, to refer to many things at once (Nicolas 2002).
In some of his early work Laycock makes arguments by analogy to support the proposal that mass expressions are veiled plural expressions, so that water, in its analysis, gets treated like apples or Hobbits does.
It continues by arguing that, if plural expressions were committed to collections or any other "set-like" objects, then the truth of (17) would lead straight to Russell's paradox.
