Stereotyping and generics
In: Inquiry: an interdisciplinary journal of philosophy and the social sciences, S. 1-17
ISSN: 1502-3923
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In: Inquiry: an interdisciplinary journal of philosophy and the social sciences, S. 1-17
ISSN: 1502-3923
In: Synthese: an international journal for epistemology, methodology and philosophy of science, Band 199, Heft 5-6, S. 14383-14401
ISSN: 1573-0964
AbstractThis 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.