teichmanphilosophy

In this text, I argue that generic statements—statements of the form Fs are G, such as 'Bears are furry'—are particular statements about kinds, rather than general statements about individual objects. Although statements of this form intuitively seem like generalizations, I claim that in this case, appearances are deceptive. First, I present new linguistic evidence which raises problems for the standard quantificational theory of generic sentences, according to which generic sentences contain a hidden, unpronounced quantifier. Though the simple kind theory has served as a standard alternative to quantificational approaches in the literature on generics since Carlson (1977), it also has a more sophisticated cousin, which has largely been ignored. I develop an extension of the sophisticated kind theory and show how it can neatly account for these phenomena while sidestepping the standard objections to the simple kind theory. At a broader level, I would like to claim that if a kind theory provides the best explanation for the truth conditions of these sentences in English, then it tells us something interesting about English speakers: namely, that in virtue of their speaking English, they implicitly presuppose an ontology with kinds as possible objects. In this way, I suggest, the search for the best semantic theory of generic sentences has the potential to lead us towards a new, philosophically valuable conception of kindhood.

Generic sentences are commonsense statements of the form 'Fs are G,' like 'Bears have fur' or 'Rattlesnakes are poisonous.' Kind theories hold that rather than being general statements about individual objects, they are particular statements about kinds. This paper examines the standard objections against the kind theory and argues that they only apply to the most simplified version of the theory. The more sophisticated version, which has received little discussion in the literature in spite of having been formulated concurrently with the simple version, is immune to this standard battery of objections. After discussing four distinctive features of generic sentences, the paper then presents a modernized extension of the sophisticated kind theory which explains the presence of these features. Although the choice between a kind theory and the more standardly accepted adverbial quantificational theory is complex, these considerations suggest that the two approaches are at least deserving of equal consideration for the purposes of natural language semantics.

The idea that it is possible to draw philosophical conclusions from a semantic analysis, though sometimes talked about as one of the key insights of the 20th century in philosophy, has largely fallen out of favor today. Call any philosophy which takes its cue from that idea linguistic philosophy. This paper argues that the development of new methodologies in post-Montagovian natural language semantics point the way toward a revitalized conception of linguistic philosophy which is immune to the major criticisms that were once levelled against it. The claims put forth by this new variety of linguistic philosophy are more modest and provisional than the claims put forth by the old variety---which can be seen as either an advantage or disadvantage, depending on our other commitments.

This paper presents a new conditional logic for generic statements, which seeks to capture their abductive purport. Previous conditional logics for generics (Delgrande, 1987, 1988; Asher and Pelletier, 1997) explain the fact that generic statements tolerate exceptions primarily via the notion of normality: the permissible exceptions to a statement like 'Birds fly' are simply the abnormal birds. A consequence of this approach is that the class of possible counterexamples to a generic statement is radically open-ended. Our approach, by contrast, understands the class of permissible exceptions to a generic statement like `Fs are G' as nothing more than the class of actual Fs. This is a new way of cashing out, via the tools of philosophical logic, the intuitive idea that hypothesized scenarios must be scenarios we don't already know to be false. Thus, we argue, this logic does a better job of accounting for the role that generic statements play in patterns of explanation: where previous approaches focus on the role they play in inductive reasoning, ours illuminates the role they play in abductive reasoning.

This paper explores some unforeseen consequences of Timothy Williamson's semantics for racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation-based slurs as conventional implicature triggers (Williamson, 2009). On this view, merely using a slur triggers a conventional implicature to the effect that members of a given group of people typically possesses some undesirable property. I argue, drawing on properties of conventional implicature observed in Kartunnen and Peters (1979) and Potts (2005), that if Williamson's semantics is correct, it has the interesting consequence of blurring the traditionally sharp distinction between substantive and merely terminological disputes in philosophy.

This paper responds to Davidson's argument that metaphors only what they mean literally (Davidson, 1978) by instead suggesting that metaphoric usages be thought of neither as meanings, nor as something entirely different, but rather as meanings in thb making. These considerations emerge out of Wittgenstein's discussion of rule following, John McDowell's interpretation of Wittgenstein (McDowell, 1992), and some basic data from historical linguistics (Campbell 1999).