Generics: some (non) specifics
Authors
Publication Date
2021-12Journal Title
Synthese
ISSN
0039-7857
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
199
Issue
5-6
Pages
14383-14401
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Bosse, A. (2021). Generics: some (non) specifics. Synthese, 199 (5-6), 14383-14401. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03426-8
Description
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000267
Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.</jats:p>
Keywords
Original Research, Indeterminacy and Underdetermination, Generics, Genericity, Non-specificity, Propositional pluralism, Context-sensitivity, Semantic incompleteness
Identifiers
s11229-021-03426-8, 3426
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03426-8
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/332520
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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