Generic conjunctivitis

Journal article

It is widely accepted that generics express law-like generalisations, on the basis of evidencethat their truth does not depend only on how things are in the actual world at one momentin time. In this paper, I propose a temporal truthmaker semantics for generics and arguethat this theory can account for the intuition that generics express law-like generalisations.The law-likeness of generics therefore does not motivate the introduction of either theunarticulated constituent ‘GEN’ or a domain of abstract kinds. Instead, it can be explainedby the nature of the states which make generics true, which may be either generic facts abouta category, or particular facts about the instances of a category

Authors: Kirkpatrick, JR

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer
• Journal: Linguistics and Philosophy
• Volume: 46
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 379-428
• Publication date: 2022-11-08
• DOI: 10.1007/s10988-022-09371-0
• EISSN: 1573-0549
• ISSN: 0165-0157
• Language: English
• Keywords: Computer science; Philosophy; Natural (archaeology); Sentence; History; Scope (computer science); Philosophy of language; Epistemology; Metaphysics; Philosophy of science; Linguistics; Mereology; Prima facie