 While it hasn’t been definitively demonstrated that the mass/count distinction is not universal (cf. Chierchia 2021), neither can one easily claim that it is (cf. Massam 2012 ch.1). Maybe its universality is not needed for their purposes, but authors frequently seem to argue that syntactical, lexical, or semantic features of mass vs. count give one strong reason to believe that such a distinction goes beyond the representational and reflects reality itself.