Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmMental representations can point to concrete objects/substances in the real world, but since they come from a process of abstraction, they are abstract. If something is not an object/substance, or the properties or relations of an object/substance, then it cannot be concrete. <Abstract> refers to a general idea of something, including the general characteristics of a concrete particular, in other words, an abstract particular. We might acknowledge there's a different level of abstraction in a process that creates a mental representation triggered by the sensory experience of objects, as compared to one construed from the memory of past experiences. In both we are dealing with abstract particulars, but one seems to be more specific. I understand some will want to call "concrete" this abstract particular, but this is not my preferred distinction between abstract and concrete.
…
I understand that is Frege's position, that entails the ontological existence of abstract objects in a third realm (non-physical, non-mental), and for which he is considered a platonist. If one is not a platonist, abstract objects don't exist, and they can only be mental objects in the sense we have discussed before. I prefer to take as much distance as possible of platonism, so I cannot endorse Frege's view of abstracta as non-mental, non-physical entities, no matter how conventional that view might have become in contemporary philosophy.
…
The brain process of abstraction produces the experience or event of mental representation that we call <abstract>.
…
Again, assuming contemporary ontology (along with it, the philosophy of mind) has finally endorsed Frege's platonism, and assuming the SEP entry is right on this, I may be endorsing a traditional, outmoded view:
The most important alternative to the Way of Negation is what Lewis calls the Way of Abstraction. According to a longstanding tradition in philosophical psychology, abstraction is a distinctive mental process in which new ideas or conceptions are formed by considering several objects or ideas and omitting the features that distinguish them. For example, if one is given a range of white things of varying shapes and sizes; one ignores or ‘abstracts from’ the respects in which they differ, and thereby attains the abstract idea of whiteness. Nothing in this tradition requires that ideas formed in this way represent or correspond to a distinctive kind of object. But it might be maintained that the distinction between abstract and concrete objects should be explained by reference to the psychological process of abstraction or something like it. The simplest version of this strategy would be to say that an object is abstract if it is (or might be) the referent of an abstract idea, i.e., an idea formed by abstraction.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abst ... s/#WayAbst
First of all, to accept and use the platonistic concept of abstractness is not to affirm that
there (really) are such abstract entities.
You write that "if one is not a platonist, abstract objects don't exist, and they can only be mental objects in the sense we have discussed before." – Of course, antiplatonism doesn't include the rejection of "abstract" mental representations (ideas, concepts) or (mental or physical
tokens of) "abstract" linguistic representations (words, especially nouns), which are said to result from a psychological or semiological process called "abstraction".
No such abstract (mental or physical) representation is platonistically abstract. (But note that concepts qua
nonmental predicate-meanings/-senses are platonistically abstract; and so are
types of linguistic signs.)
In order to avoid confusion and misunderstanding, the psychologically or semiologically abstract representations Locke and others are talking about had better be called
abstractive or
abstracting, or
general instead.
"Abstraction. The use of words then being to stand as outward marks of our internal ideas, and those ideas being taken from particular things, if every particular idea that we take in should have a distinct name, names must be endless. To prevent this, the mind makes the particular ideas received from particular objects to become general; which is done by considering them as they are in the mind such appearances, separate from all other existences, and the circumstances of real existence, as time, place, or any other concomitant ideas. This is called abstraction, whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all of the same kind; and their names general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such abstract ideas. Such precise, naked appearances in the mind, without considering how, whence, or with what others they came there, the understanding lays up (with names commonly annexed to them) as the standards to rank real existences into sorts, as they agree with these patterns, and to denominate them accordingly. Thus the same colour being observed today in chalk or snow, which the mind yesterday received from milk, it considers that appearance alone, makes it a representative of all of that kind; and having given it the name whiteness, it by that sound signifies the same quality wheresoever to be imagined or met with; and thus universals, whether ideas or terms, are made.
Brutes abstract not. If it may be doubted whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas that way to any degree: This, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to. For it is evident we observe no footsteps in them of making use of general signs for universal ideas; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting, or making general ideas, since they have no use of words, or any other general signs."
(Lovcke, John.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Book II, ch. XI, §§9-10)
"How general words are made. The next thing to be considered is, how general words come to be made. For since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms, or where find we those general natures they are supposed to stand for? Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which, having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort."
(Lovke, John.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Book III, ch. III, §6)
"Following Lewis’ terminology, let’s call these accounts of the abstract-concrete distinction “Ways.”
…
One of these is what Lewis (1986 [On the Plurality of Worlds]: 84) calls the Way of Abstraction, according to which abstract entities “result from somehow subtracting specificity, so that an incomplete description of the original concrete entity would be a complete description of the abstraction.” So described, the Way of Abstraction admits of several very different interpretations. The least plausible of these takes abstract entities to be “abstractions” akin to “abstract ideas” and therefore much like our ideas of redness or sphericality that we cognitively “subtract” from experiences. Interpreted this way, the Way of Abstraction implausibly requires that all abstract entities are mind-dependent mental entities and therefore runs contrary to any standard conception of platonism.
A more plausible interpretation of the Way of Abstraction takes abstract entities to be the referents of terms introduced using what are sometimes called “abstraction principles.” These principles seek to implicitly define terms referring to abstracta by specifying the truth-conditions of identity claims about abstracta in terms of concrete entities. On this view, abstract entities are not somehow brought into existence by a mental act of “subtracting specificity,” but our success in referring to them and, in turn, our epistemic access to them owes to the relevant abstraction principles. In using such principles, a standard ambition is to implicitly define abstract objects—most notably, numbers—in terms of nothing more than certain relational predicates among concrete entities (e.g., “are in one-to-one correspondence”). One such proposal holds that we can define putative abstracta like directions in terms of a relational predicate “is parallel with” that is true of certain lines.2 Speaking loosely, such a view introduces an operator, “is the direction of” and then defines an expression like “the direction of line b” by noting that directions of lines are identical if and only if they are parallel. In this way, abstraction principles are what allow us to define and, in turn, refer to alleged abstract entities like the number of planets or the directions of lines.
There is a venerable platonist tradition that relies upon abstraction principles in providing an epistemology of mathematics and other abstract entities; however, it is unclear whether such a view might plausibly explain the abstract–concrete distinction itself. It is also rather unclear how notions like “incompleteness” or “subtracting specificity” might be of much help in this regard. Finally, there is no guarantee that abstract entities are all and only those entities that admit of contextual definition along these lines. So, while we are under no obligation to reject the use of abstraction principles and we will return to views in this neighbourhood in subsequent chapters, we can set aside the Way of Abstraction here. In its place, we will turn to reductionist proposals that invoke criteria like location, causation, and necessity to analyze abstractness."
(Cowling, Sam.
Abstract Entities. New York: Routledge, 2017. pp. 75-6)
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmMereological means more than the sum, but the relationship between the parts and the whole, so that the parts define the whole and the whole defines the parts. But it is clear that the identification of the parts that make the whole relies on convention and is almost arbitrary, since there are no limits to this criteria. Sets as classifications are indeed mere abstractions (mental things), while the actual members of these sets, their properties and relations, may not.
If sets are "mental things", what kind of mental things are they?
They're surely not concepts (qua mental representations), but nonmental
concept-extensions at most, with the extension of a concept being the set of things falling under it. And sets aren't mental things.
The problem of vagueness occurs in mereology too:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/#IndFuz
However, even if there are borderline cases of parthood, where it is indeterminate whether something is part of something else or not, it is not the case that what is part of what is always a matter of human convention or decision.
Mereology is one thing and set theory is another. The members of a set aren't identical to it, whereas the parts of a
purely mereological whole are identical to it. According to set theory, there is even a memberless set—the empty set—, but there are no partless wholes. (There are also sets with just one member, so-called singletons; and if parthood is a reflexive relation, such that everything is part of itself, there are wholes with just one part.)
"Mereology is ontologically innocent.
To be sure, if we accept mereology, we are committed to the existence of all manner of mereological fusions. But given a prior commitment to cats, say, a commitment to cat-fusions is not a further commitment. The fusion is nothing over and above the cats that compose it. It just is them. They just are it. Take them together or take them separately, the cats are the same portion of Reality either way. Commit yourself to their existence all together or one at a time, it’s the same commitment either way. If you draw up an inventory of Reality according to your scheme of things, it would be double counting to list the cats and then also list their fusion. In general, if you are already committed to some things, you incur no further commitment when you affirm the existence of their fusion. The new commitment is redundant, given the old one.
…
I say that composition – the relation of part to whole, or, better, the many-one relation of many parts to their fusion – is like identity. The ‘are’ of composition is, so to speak the plural form of the ‘is’ of identity. Call this the Thesis of Composition as Identity. It is in virtue of this thesis that mereology is ontologically innocent: it commits us only to things that are identical, so to speak, to what we were committed to before."
(Lewis, David.
Parts of Classes. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. p. 81-2)
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmConsul wrote:Are you saying there are no objective facts about parthood?
Not really, because the relationship between the parts and the whole of a real object are real, but there are almost infinite relationships to choose from. Therefore, any set is an arbitrary and abstract classification, which lies more in the mind of the observer than in the objects themselves, which is what naturally happens with relational properties. It may be a fact that I'm standing next to a tree, but there are many other ways to describe the same situation considering other elements of reference (the ground, the coordinate system, the observer's position, etc.)
Again, the subject matter of mereology aren't sets (and the relation of set-membership).
There is only one fundamental mereological relation, viz.
parthood; so I'm not sure what you mean by "almost infinite relationships to choose from".
Of course, both sets and sums of things can be arbitrarily selected and described by means of arbitrarily defined general concepts or common nouns; but it doesn't follow that a set or sum of things is always mind- or language-dependent (let alone mental itself) and "lies more in the mind of the observer than in the objects themselves."
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmConsul wrote:According to mereological universalism (as defended by Lewis and many others), for any two or more things, there is a thing which is their sum or fusion, and which exists independently of any mental categorization/conceptualization/classification.
Lewis' "trout-turkeys" are a famous example. A trout-turkey is "the mereological fusion of the front half of a trout plus the back half of a turkey" (Lewis), and it is as concept- and mind-independently real as trouts and turkeys, despite the fact that nobody uses the concept of a trout-turkey in addition to the concepts of a trout and a turkey.
Lewis defense of his arbitrary "fusion" as an objective reality is the best exposition against it.
Of course, a trout-turkey is a "queer" fusion, a bizarre object; but if front halves of trouts and back halves of turkeys are objectively real, then I fail to see why mereological fusions/sums of them aren't equally real.
By the way, mereological universalism with its acceptance of all sorts of unusual wholes has a nice solution to the problem of mereological vagueness: There is no objective mereological indeterminacy in the world, because all such apparent vagueness is due to "semantic indecision" (Lewis).
"The only intelligible account of vagueness locates it in our thought and language. The reason it's vague where the outback begins is not that there's this thing, the outback, with imprecise borders; rather there are many things, with different borders, and nobody has been fool enough to try to enforce a choice of one of them as the official referent of the word 'outback'. Vagueness is semantic indecision."
(Lewis, David.
On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. p. 212)
"Mereological Universalism. For every non-empty set S, the members of that set compose something. (Equivalent to Arbitrary Sums.)
On the plus side, Mereological Universalism is a very simple principle. In addition, if Universalism were true, there would be no vagueness or indeterminacy in the world.We would never have to worry whether some things really met the conditions necessary for composition, since there are no such conditions beyond mere existence.
On the minus side, Universalism seems to multiply entities needlessly, contrary to Ockham’s Razor. Second, Universalism is contrary to our ordinary way of identifying and counting things. Suppose we found four wooden rocking chairs in a room and were asked, ‘How many wooden things are in the room?’ We would be unlikely to answer that there were an astronomical number of wooden things, one corresponding to every possible combination of woody bits contained by the four chairs.We don’t ordinarily believe in scattered or arbitrarily gerrymandered objects."
(Koons, Robert C., and Timothy H. Pickavance.
The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. p. 507)
As for universalism's alleged disadvantages, Lewis would reply that it doesn't "multiply entities needlessly" because it's "ontologically innocent"—see the quote above! And that it is "contrary to our ordinary way of identifying and counting things" and "[w]e don’t ordinarily believe in scattered or arbitrarily gerrymandered objects" doesn't mean that these objects don't really exist. Counterintuitiveness doesn't mean falseness! If trouts and turkeys are real objects, so are trout-turkeys!
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pm Consul wrote:From the point of view of (abstractist/platonist) realism about classes/sets—which isn't mine!—, conceptualizing or naming a class/set isn't constructing/creating or making it, because for any plurality of things there is a concept-independent class/set whose members they are, no matter how similar or dissimilar they are from one another. As Grossmann says, "the set consisting of the desk before me, the oldest living rabbit in Australia, and a hair on Napoleon's head, is a perfectly wholesome set of three things."
Yes, it's a wholesome arbitrary collection of three things, not essentially tied to each other to conform an ontological, substantial unity. And even when we point to the constituent parts of a whole, we can arbitrarily select infinite collections of these parts to describe the same whole. So, as collections of things, as membership, they are clearly concept-dependent, in other words, subjective.
No, what is concept-dependent is our
thought and talk about sets or sums of things, but not the sets or sums thought and talked about. There are indefinitely many possible ways of conceptualizing, describing and classifying/taxonomizing things, but concepts don't create or invent the things they represent. They are ways of
thinking of things, and not ways of
making things.
Sets depend for their existence on those objects which are their members, and sums depend for their existence on those objects which are their parts; but neither sets nor sums depend for the existence on
concepts of those objects.
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmConsul wrote:I doubt that true predication always requires existence.
There can't be attributes of a substance that doesn't exist. There can be, however, imaginary attributes of imaginary beings, which are not real, of course.
Nonexistent objects cannot have existent properties, but predication isn't the same as attribution. That is, to say that a predicate P is true of something x isn't necessarily to say that there is a corresponding property P* had by x.
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmAny statement about non-existent things cannot be true,…
This is itself a statement about nonexistent things, so it's false if it is true. For if there were no truths about nonexistents, then there would be the truth about them that there are no truths about them.
Anyway, there are
negative truths about nonexistents at least, such as that they don't exist.
Are there also
positive truths about them? As a matter of fact, we do say many positive things about them such as "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" and "Sherlock Holmes lives in London, 221B Baker Street". However, of course, if there are such positive truths about nonexistents, then the question is what makes them true?
One simple suggestion is that what makes it true that Sherlock Holmes is a detective living in London is that his "creator" Arthur Conan Doyle
represents (characterizes, describes) him as a detective living in London. So a positive fact concerning the fictional Holmes is made true by positive facts concerning the real Doyle.
In the case of nonexistent (fictional/imaginary) objects or persons there is no difference between
being and being represented to be. They are what they are thought to be, since they are nothing more than objects of thought.
For more and other suggestions, see:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmActually, both <dog> and <doghood> can be said to be concepts or kinds, the difference lies only in that one concept represents the entities dogs and the other the properties that make dogs, and both can be at the same time categories.
I use "<…>" to refer to concepts; and I consciously wrote "the kind doghood" rather than "the kind <doghood>", because doghood
qua kind is not a concept (no matter whether kinds are entities sui generis, i.e substantial universals, or reducible to classes/sets, aggregates/fusions/sums, or complex properties): the kind
dog(hood) ≠ the concept <dog> (& the kind
dog(hood) ≠ the predicate "dog").
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmConsul wrote:
No, it can only think in the sense of using nonlinguistic mental images. That is, dogs can only "think with pictures". So, if thought is the same as imagination, then languageless animals are capable of thought; but I use "thought" more narrowly.
So it looks as we had two different domains of thought, one linguistic and the other one non-linguistic. Or, thought is non-linguistic and language is just an added feature. This is what makes more sense and it would take quite an effort to prove that animals don't think. But then, properly speaking, thinking will not be about words.
I'd say we have two domains of
imagination: There is both
linguistic imagination (and imagery) and
non-linguistic imagination (and imagery). Whether cases of the latter can properly be called "thought" depends on the definition of "thought". If it's narrowly defined as
inner speech, then non-linguistic imagination isn't thought.
So what exactly occurs in the conscious minds of animals lacking a natural language such as English that can properly be called thought. How can they think and by means of what? What exactly is non-linguistic (or linguistically non-expressed) thought and what things are its vehicles?
"It is beyond serious doubt that nonlinguistic creatures are capable of thinking and reasoning about the physical environment in highly sophisticated ways."
(Bermúdez, José Luis. "Can Nonlinguistic Animals Think about Thinking." In
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, edited by Kristin Andrews and Jacob Beck, 119-130. New York: Routledge, 2018. p. 119)
However, he admits that…
"The fact of the matter, however, is that we have little idea of what the vehicle of nonlinguistic thought might be. At the level of the vehicle, nonlinguistic thoughts are rather similar to scientific unobservables (Sellars 1956/1997). We can see their effects but (as yet) only speculate as to the intrinsic nature of their vehicles." (p. 192)
And despite his belief in nonlinguistic thought, he disbelieves in nonlinguistic meta-thought, i.e. thought about thought(s):
"The central claim is that all thinking that involves intentional ascent (roughly, all thinking that involves thinking about thoughts) requires the capacity for semantic ascent (roughly, the capacity to think about words)." (p. 151)
"[W]e have reached the conclusion that thoughts can only be the objects of the type of reflexive thinking in which thoughts are the objects of thought if they have natural-language vehicles." (pp. 163-4)
(Bermúdez, José Luis.
Thinking without Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.)
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmWe obviously disagree, but I think it might be just a matter of preference. Your original reference to the type/token distinction seems to support my view (see below), although in some other places the same entry contradicts itself.
The distinction between a type and its tokens is an ontological one between a general sort of thing and its particular concrete instances...
...Are types universals? They have usually been so conceived, and with good reason. But the matter is controversial. It depends in part on what a universal is. (See the entry on properties.) Universals, in contrast to particulars, have been characterized as having instances, being repeatable, being abstract, being acausal, lacking a spatio-temporal location and being predicable of things. Whether universals have all these characteristics cannot be resolved here. The point is that types seem to have some, but not all, of these characteristics. As should be clear from the preceding discussion, types have or are capable of having instances, of being exemplified; they are repeatable. To many, this is enough to count as universals...
...So far, then, types appear to be a species of universal, and most metaphysicians would so classify them.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/
Types can be regarded as substantial universals (kind-universals), but then the type-token distinction isn't applicable to works of art (literature or music). It makes sense to speak of the kind(-universal)
symphony, but it doesn't make sense to speak of the kind(-universal)
Beethoven's ninth symphony.
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmBy saying "virtual presence" I acknowledged that being represented doesn't entail being, although there are some nuances to this statement: we just simply cannot produce a first-time thought of things that don't exist, because if they never existed, they were never perceived, they would not be intelligible, nor reproducible. That does not mean that we cannot imagine non-real things, by way of recreating previous representations of real things, combining them in different ways. Let's be reminded of gargoyles as imaginary beings or Piranesi's etchings of Rome.
But the real point was that every representation is the symbolic reproduction of something else, the representation of A entails A (real or unreal). A physical (real) representation of a gargoyle does not imply the realistic nature of gargoyle characters. But a musical score cannot represent an unreal symphony, unless it was not really a score, perhaps something that looks like it, but does not refer to something playable. So, a real musical score entails the being of real musical composition.
If by "musical composition" you mean an abstract work of music, that's what I deny!
A score of a symphony represents the symphony and is a recipe for performances of it, telling conductors and musicians how to realize it physically. The representational and instructional functions of a symphony score don't require the existence of the symphony qua abstract object. The symphony itself is nothing more than a fictional or imaginary object.
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmConsul wrote:
Which concrete particular is BNS, and where is it (now)?
I think it is, as a said before, a social or cultural object. As such, it can be anything that contains and reproduces the original Beethoven's score. In that sense, all of these are actually occurrences of the original composition, a concrete singular.
There is only one BNS, so which one social or cultural object is it? There are many copies of the original score, there are many performances of the symphony, there are many recordings of performances of it, and there are many musical images of it in many minds; but none of them is the unique musical object called BNS.
BNS is not a universal that can be multiply instantiated by many different things at many different places and times. Anyway, even if it were a universal, none of its instances would be
it, since a universal and its instances are different things.
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmClearly, particular performances of BNS or Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody can be tokens of abstract types, of general categories, such as "performances of BNS" or "Queen's music". That can be said of any particular, but that is not to say that there can't be occurrences of a concrete particular:
Now this may seem impossible; how can one and the same thing occur more than once without there being two tokens of it? Simons (1982) concludes that it can't. Wetzel (1993) argues that it is useful to distinguish objects from occurrences of them. For example, in the sequence of numbers <0,1,0,1> the very same number, the number one, occurs twice, yet its first occurrence is distinct from its second. The notion of an occurrence of x in y involves not only x and y, but also how x is situated in y. Even a concrete object can occur more than once in a sequence—the same person occurs twice in the sequence of New Jersey million dollar lottery winners, remarkably enough. If we think of an expression as a sequence, then the air of mystery over how the same identical thing can occur twice vanishes.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/#Occ
Wetzel doesn't say that a concrete particular (qua token) can occur multiply in the sense of being capable of spatiotemporal multilocation:
"Tokens are concrete particulars; whether objects or events they have a unique spatio-temporal location." (L. Wetzel)
For Wetzel, the occurrence of a token or type is not just its existence, but is always an occurrence
in a sequence (or structure). She writes that "a concrete object can occur more than once in a sequence—the same person occurs twice in the sequence of New Jersey million dollar lottery winners," but a place in an ordered sequence
as an abstract n-tuple—(x1,…, xn) or <x1,…, xn> [as opposed to the order-indifferent set {x1,…, xn}]—is not a place in physical space but in "logical space". Logical or mathematical tuples (lists) are as platonistically abstract as sets. One and the same person cannot occur twice in the
set of NJ lottery winners, but she can occur twice in a
list of NJ lottery winners. However, the latter can be interpreted deflationarily—without any ontological commitment to abstract lists—as meaning simply that one and the same person can be
a two-time winner of the NJ lottery.
Can a BNS-performance (qua concrete token) occur multiply? Being a unique event, it cannot be (wholly) multilocated in space or time. Are there any abstract sequences in which a particular BNS-performance occurs (non-spatiotemporally) more than once, in which it has at least two or more positions? For example, one and the same BNS-performance can occur more than once (have more than one position) in a list of award-winning BNS-performances, since it can get two or more awards.
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑March 10th, 2019, 1:04 pmConsul wrote:
The question relevant here is not whether what (the play) Hamlet is about is fictional or real, but whether (the play) Hamlet itself is fictional or real. Of course, if Shakespeare's original manuscript is Hamlet, then Hamlet did "appear in a place and time in history." But to think so is to turn Hamlet into a (unique) piece of paper, which is highly implausible.
Of course, all concrete Hamlet-representations—the original manuscript and all printed versions of it—did and do appear at some place and at some time; but Hamlet itself is not to be confused and not to be equated with any concrete (mental or physical) representation of it.
When we think of these are occurrences of the original theatrical composition, then the need to reduce Hamlet to a single instance disappears.
Hum…
We need to be careful here so as not to create confusion. We have abstract types, concrete tokens, and (Wetzelian) occurrences of types or tokens (in sequences or structures). Tokens may be said to be instances of types, but they are not (Wetzelian) occurrences of types.
My contention is that the spatiotemporal occurrence of a (copy of the original) playscript of Hamlet or a stage performance of the play Hamlet is not a spatiotemporal occurrence of Hamlet
itself. For example, two Hamlet-performances can take place at the same time in Germany, but this wouldn't mean that the play Hamlet itself is spatially multilocated.
Anyway, note that when Wetzel speaks of multiple occurrences of types or tokens (in something), she doesn't mean
spatiotemporal occurrences. For types (occurring in other types) are non-spatiotemporal in principle, and what has no spatiotemporal location/position at all, doesn't have more than one either; and tokens (occurring in other tokens) have only one spatiotemporal location/position (at one time).