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The view that plural reference is reference to a set is examined in light of George Boolos's treatment of second-order quantification as plural quantification in English. I argue that monadic second-order logic does not, in Boolos's treatment, reflect the behavior of plural quantifiers under negation and claim that any sentence that properly translates a second-order formula, in accordance with his treatment, has a first-order formulation. Support for this turns on the use of certain partitive constructions to assign values to variables in a way that makes Boolos's reading of second-order variables available for a first-order language and, with it, the possibility of interpreting quantification in an unrestricted domain.

DOI: 10.1007/BF01306897

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