 So if syntax or lexical meaning won’t do it, maybe a semantic distinction will do? Huddleston &amp; Payne go on to distinguish between the heterogeneity of terms like ‘crockery’ and ‘furniture’, which are not dissective, versus terms like ‘water,’ which are (2002, 336–7). (They call the former sort of mass terms ‘aggregative’). But if dissectivity is taken seriously as a semantic requirement to be considered as mass, then it will end up that an H2O molecule is not water, nor is an NaCl molecule salt. (More on the non-atomic criteria is discussed in the Supplement on  Non-Atomicity and Its Relevance to the Mass/Count Distinction).  As the authors point out (p338), when some material comes in small enough units, we often treat it as +MASS/-COUNT, such as dust, hair (e.g. when there’s scattered piles of it on the floor), change (i.e., coins)––not because we think the stuff is non-atomic, but because when the atoms are small enough it is more convenient or intuitive to think of it in a +MASS way. Dissectivity may do some work, but only to a point, and so it’s not really what is distinguishing mass from count. And we cannot appeal to language-users’ intentions in particular instances to settle whether their use is mass or count because it may be “that in most instances speakers simply have no intentions that are relevant” (Pelletier 2001 p496, summarizing Ware 1975). Often, people’s use, mental states, and the nature of the referent under-determine whether on a particular occasion a noun/term/expression is used in a mass or count manner.