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The radical account of bare plural generics

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Abstract

Bare plural generic sentences pervade ordinary talk. And yet it is extremely controversial what semantics to assign to such sentences. In this paper, I achieve two tasks. First, I develop a novel classification of the various standard uses to which bare plurals may be put. This “variety data” is important—it gives rise to much of the difficulty in systematically theorizing about bare plurals. Second, I develop a novel account of bare plurals, the radical account. On this account, all bare plurals fail to express propositions. The content of a bare plural has to be pragmatically “completed” by a speaker in order for her to make an assertion. At least the content of a quantifier expression has to be supplied. But sometimes, the content of a sentential operator or modal verb is also supplied. The radical account straightforwardly explains the variety data: Speakers’ communicative intentions vary wildly across different contexts. The radical account should be taken seriously in the literature on generics.

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Notes

  1. For convenience, I omit corner quotes in favor of single quotation marks.

  2. I restrict my attention to individual-level bare plurals. What are excluded from my purview are kind-level bare plurals. Intuitively, an individual-level bare plural is about the individual members of some kind. A kind-level bare plural is about the kind itself. For instance, ‘Bachelors are unmarried’ is an individual-level bare plural, whereas ‘Dinosaurs are extinct’ is a kind-level bare plural. Individual bachelors are unmarried. But individual dinosaurs are not rare. For some discussion of this distinction, see Krifka (1987) and Leslie and Lerner (2016).

  3. For a recent overview of the literature on the semantics of bare plurals, see Sterken (2017).

  4. For instance, see Asher and Bonevac (1996), Cheng (2011), Haslanger (2010, 2014), Johnston and Leslie (2012), Lerner and Leslie (2013), Leslie (2017), Nickel (2010), Sorensen (2012), and Wasserman (2011).

  5. Statistical generalizations are expressed by quantified sentences.

  6. These cases are variants of cases that Sterken (2015a, p. 18) develops.

  7. If only a few barns were red, it seems the speaker speaks falsely.

  8. I largely leave the notion of a “sort” of proposition at an intuitive level. Here are some examples to help illustrate what I mean by ‘sort of proposition’. ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ expresses (1) a statistical generalization, ‘Under normal circumstances, most turtles die young’ expresses (2) a proposition about what is normal, and ‘Ideally, everyone is virtuous’ expresses (3) a proposition about what is ideal. These are all different sorts of propositions.

  9. Countless other instances of homoplural use variety could be given. Here is another pair of cases. First, suppose that Jim believes that (1) all boys should cry but also that (2) no boys, in fact, cry. Jim utters ‘Boys don’t cry’ in the presence of an attentive audience that is fully aware of Jim’s odd belief that (2). Jim thereby asserts, falsely, that all boys don’t cry—a statistical generalization. Second, suppose that Dale is a mean-spirited father who firmly believes that no boy should ever cry. One day, Dale sees his young son crying and utters ‘Boys don’t cry’. Dale thereby asserts that, ideally, all boys don’t cry. In the former case, a statistical generalization is asserted. In the latter case, a proposition about what is ideal is asserted. [I intend to use ‘ideally’ in an intuitive manner, but, as suggested by a reviewer, I would have no problem understanding ‘ideally’ in the technical, kind-relative sense employed by Leslie (2015b)].

  10. Clause (2) provides simplified truth conditions for what Cohen calls a ‘relative generic’. Nothing of importance here rests on this simplification.

  11. Perhaps Alice is playing the color-guessing game Mary played in Sect. 2.3.

  12. The radical view starkly contrasts with previously developed views, on which bare plurals do express propositions. For a sample of such views, see Asher and Pelletier (1997), Cohen (1999), Krifka et al. (1995), Leslie (2007), Liebesman (2011), Nickel (2009), Nickel (2016), Sterken (2015a), and Wasserman (2011).

  13. I will henceforth use a strict notion of what is said so that a speaker S says P in context c by uttering e iff the semantic content of e in c is P. Similarly, I henceforth use will ‘express’ so that e expresses P in context c iff the semantic content of e in c is P.

  14. For the seminal work on this topic, see Grice (1989b).

  15. I am assuming that the semantic minimalism of Cappelen and Lepore (2005) is false. I deny that every declarative sentence expresses some proposition. See Bach (2006) and Carston (2008) for critical discussion of semantic minimalism.

  16. This is effectively Bach’s (2000) response. For the case of Ann and Mary considered here, I am indebted to Troy Cross.

  17. And lest you become skeptical that speakers ever complete what they say, I ask you to consider subsentential expressions. Suppose that Alice is at a restaurant in Spain, that the only word of Spanish Alice recognizes and understands is ‘agua’ (Spanish for ‘water’), and that Alice knows that her waiter does not recognize or understand any English whatsoever. Alice may nonetheless utter ‘agua’ in order to assert that she wants water. The word ‘agua’ clearly expresses a mere propositional radical, and yet Alice may complete it in order to make an assertion. Observe that, even here, not just any completion is allowed. Alice cannot (non-figuratively) assert that she does not want water by uttering ‘agua’. For an objection to the view that subsentential expressions can be used to make assertions, see Stanley (2000, pp. 407–409). For replies, see Reinaldo and Stainton (2004) and Stainton (2006).

  18. Work such as Hall’s (2008) aims to address Stanley’s (2002) concern that pragmatic approaches overgenerate readings.

  19. Notice the analogy between ‘Ann is ready’ and ‘Zorks flibbet’. Without sufficiently rich mutual background beliefs about Ann (and what activities are of conversational relevant), one cannot successfully convey a proposition to her audience by uttering ‘Ann is ready’. Analogously, without sufficiently rich mutual background beliefs about zorks and flibetting, one cannot successfully convey a proposition to her audience by uttering ‘Zorks flibett’. These observations are straightforwardly explained if ‘Ann is ready’ and ‘Zorks flibbet’ are both semantically incomplete.

  20. I believe Bach (1994) would have us appeal to a sort of impliciture he calls ‘expansion’—in addition to completion—when something besides a quantifier is added to the content of a bare plural. In order to ease discussion, however, I gloss over this complication.

  21. The material in brackets indicates the content that is added by completion.

  22. Of course, for the speaker’s communicative intention to be reasonable, she must reasonably believe that her audience can ascertain what she intends to communicate. For more discussion of this point, see Sect. 4.2.

  23. Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor—a principle stating that “senses [semantic meanings] are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” (Grice 1989a, p. 47)—thus favors the radical account. For detailed discussion of Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor, see Bontly (2005).

  24. With that said, the radical account is distinct from Liebesman’s (2011) account, which also does not posit covert syntactic structure. For some critical discussion of Liebesman’s view, see Leslie (2015a) and Sterken (2016).

  25. For further discussion of this point, see Bach (2002, pp. 24–26), Bach (2001b, pp. 26–27), Borg (2005, p. 255) and Soames (2008, p. 460).

  26. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this worry to my attention.

  27. Thanks to Kent Bach and Ezra Schwartz for helpful discussion on this objection.

  28. That a speaker may (non-figuratively) communicate some proposition without knowing any sentence that would express that proposition is not mysterious. Suppose that Bob is a young toddler who only knows how to use the two words ‘I’ and ‘water’. Importantly, Bob need not know how to use ‘want’ or any word synonymous with it. Nonetheless, it seems that Bob may communicate that he wants water by uttering ‘I water’.

  29. For critical discussion of Leslie’s (2007) claim that generics give voice to cognitively primitive generalizations, see Sterken (2015b, p. 2507).

  30. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for not only pressing me to find empirical evidence for the thesis that children can generalize before having the linguistic ability to represent generalization, but also for also helpfully pointing me towards some relevant work in psychology. This same reviewer also wonders if there is good empirical reason to think that children who use bare plurals have the ability to form the communicative intentions the radical account requires that they do. My answer is a tentative ‘yes’. Tauzin and Gergeley (2018) find that “pragmatic inferential capacity for communicative mindreading does not depend on verbal capacities and can be induced by purely non-verbal signals that are indicative of ostensive communication already in 13-month-olds” (p. 6, my emphasis.) Leslie (2008, p. 19) observes that children begin using bare plurals by the time they are two years old, but this means that children have the capacity to decipher the communicative intentions of others for almost a year before using bare plurals. Children are, by then, surely able to form communicative intentions. And, as my discussion in Sect. 4.3 indicates, the radical does account need not require that such children be able to form specific intentions to communicate determinate propositions; it may be indeterminate what they intend to communicate.

  31. I am indebted to Troy Cross for this example.

  32. Because I do not think pronouns syntactically bind variables, I also view weak crossover effects as not providing any evidence for Gen. Leslie (2015a), who takes it for granted that pronouns syntactically bind variables, argues that weak crossover effects provide evidence for Gen.

  33. Paul Hovda originally suggested that I posit U in order to regiment my claim that bare plurals are semantically incomplete and are, in some way, “missing” a quantifier expression. I think the real work U does—if we posit it—is syntactic.

  34. Characters, à la Kaplan (1989), are functions from contexts to contents. U, being uninterpreted, never receives any content. As a result, U has no character. By the definition of what a function is, there is no function from any non-empty set to the empty set.

  35. Thanks to Will Fleisher and Paul Hovda for helpful discussion of this point.

  36. For the original articulation of this worry, see Carlson 1989, 170–171. Carlson’s famous example is ‘Hurricanes arise in this part of the Pacific’, which seems to have two readings. I opt for (10a) instead of Carlson’s sentence. I find (10a) easier to work with. But analogs of what I say about (10a) will also hold for ‘Hurricanes arise in this part of the Pacific’.

  37. Elugardo and Stainton’s case also tells against the previous objection. In their case, there seems to be—as it were—pragmatically introduced binding at the level of what is asserted. Therefore, just because ‘Politicians think they can outsmart their opponents’ has a reading on which there seems to be binding, it does not follow that there is syntactic binding.

  38. Thanks to Mark Hinchliff for helpful discussion here.

  39. I use Heim and Kratzer (1998, p. 146) as my guide here.

  40. It is common to view Gen as an adverb of quantification, but I put that view aside in order to simplify discussion. If Gen is an adverb, some analogs of what I say below still hold. Moreover, if Gen is an adverb, the objection considered in this section becomes less compelling. Adverbs are—for the most part—thought to be optional. This would explain why Gen theorists who believe Gen is an adverb of quantification are at pains to provide syntactic evidence for Gen through either (1) observations concerning variable binding or (2) observations concerning scope interactions. See Sects. 4.6 and 4.7 for my views on such alleged syntactic evidence.

  41. But perhaps there are more exceptions than just bare plural noun phrases. Mass nouns, pronouns, and most proper names do not require pronounced determiners. Effectively, I am proposing that there are some exceptions to the DP hypothesis, which was first advanced by Abney (1987). The DP hypothesis is the syntactic hypothesis that all noun phrases are headed by some determiner. The DP hypothesis is controversial. Thanks to Kent Bach for helpful discussion.

  42. For a brief discussion of (15a) and (15b), see Bach (1994, p. 128). I learned of (16a) and (16b) from John Hawthorne, who attributes them to Barbara Partee.

  43. For an early view on which bare plural noun phrases always behave semantically as proper names of kinds, see Carlson (1977). Liebesman (2011) also defends this view.

  44. For a seminal discussion on semantic type-shifting, see Partee (2002). For discussion on type-shifting down bare plural noun phrases, see Chierchia (1988), Cohen (1996, 2007), and Leslie (2015a).

  45. For instance, it is not obvious to me that ‘The raven is white’ or ‘A raven is white’ may be used to communicate a mere statistical generalization over ravens. Utterances of such expressions do not seem appropriate even if all ravens were painted white earlier today. On the other hand, a speaker may clearly utter the bare plural ‘Ravens are white’ in order to communicate a mere statistical generalization over ravens. The range of standard uses of definite and indefinite singulars seems more constrained than the range of standard uses of bare plurals.

  46. I have the intuition that Steven would be more likely to convey a normality claim rather a mere statistical generalization over men. If all men are forced to undergo some medical procedure that makes them temporarily tan today, Steven may still continue to felicitously utter ‘A man is pale’. This is naturally explained if Steven is asserting some (false) claim about what is normal for men. After all, Steven believes it is normal for all men to be pale.

  47. One might think that Steven, in the first case, is also making a claim about what is ideal when he utters ‘A man is pale’. However, a variant of the case makes it clear that Steven is not making such a claim about what is ideal. Suppose Steven is disgusted by paleness and thinks that it would be ideal if everyone were tan, not pale. Still, Steven might utter ‘A man is pale’ in order to communicate that, under normal conditions, any man is pale.

  48. I also am optimistic that the radical account may even be extended so as to cover bare singular generics (e.g. ‘Gold is yellow) and habituals (e.g. ‘Donald smokes’). ‘Gold is yellow’ may be used to either to make a make a mere statistical generalization over most gold stuff or to make a claim about what it is to be yellow. (Kant, for instance, allegedly took ‘Gold is yellow’ to be analytic.) This is an instance of homosingular use variety. On the other hand, in ordinary contexts, ‘Donald smokes’ may be used to communicate that Donald sometimes smokes; in the presence of chain smokers, ‘Donald smokes’ may be used to communicate that Donald frequently smokes. This is an instance of “homohabitual” statistical variety. I am optimistic, then, that the radical account may be extended to handle definite singulars, indefinite singulars, bare singulars, and habituals. This would be a powerful account. I leave the task of defending such an ambitious view to future work. I do not discuss bare singulars or habituals in the main text in order to ease discussion. Bare plurals, definite singulars, and indefinite singulars have attracted the most attention in the literature on generics.

  49. Restrict your attention to the generic—or characterizing—readings of the definite and indefinite singulars below. There is, for instance, a reading of (21b) on which it is asserted that a contextually salient green bottle has a narrow neck. But this is not a reading I am interested in here. That is not a generic reading of (21b).

  50. As Wasserman (2011, p. 432) notes, the linguistic orthodoxy seems to be that (22a) cannot be felicitous unless there is some non-accidental correlation between being a woman from Seattle and being left-handed. But the Gricean cancellation test suggests that such a connection need not exist in order for (22a) to be felicitous (Wasserman 2011, p. 449 fn30). ‘Women from Seattle are left-handed, and this is so by pure accident’ is—at least in certain contexts—felicitous.

  51. A natural way of understanding Greenberg’s (2003, p. 300) view that only bare plurals can express “descriptive” generalizations—whereas indefinite singulars and bare plurals can both express “in virtue of” generalizations—is to see her as claiming that GenBP ≠ GenIS.

  52. Thanks to Troy Cross for helpful discussion here.

  53. It is not strictly speaking true that all Doris has to go on is the semantic content of what Cathy uttered (i.e. ‘Ks F’). Of course, Doris also has the background belief that that Cathy speaks English, that Cathy uttered ‘Ks F’, that Cathy is human, etc. Importantly, however, Doris does not antecedently believe that Cathy believes that, in general, Ks are inherently disposed to F.

  54. Nickel (2010, p. 11) explicitly states that he will “focus on sentences with bare plural subjects.”

  55. Thanks to Ellie Cohen for helpful discussion here.

  56. For helpful conversations and comments on this paper, I wish to thank Kent Bach, Mark Bedau, David Boonin, Sean Burke, David Clark, Jaime Castillo Gamboa, Ellie Cohen, Charlotte Figueroa, Will Fleisher, Graeme Forbes, Nicholas Gigliotti, George Goodell, Jeremy Goodman, Brian Haas, John Hawthorne, Mark Hinchliff, Paul Hovda, Mahmoud Jalloh, James Kirkpatrick, Julie Martin, Elli Neufeld, Ezra Schwartz, Rachel Sterken, Elias Stern-Rodriguez, Andrew Stewart, Gabriel Uzquiano, Elise Woodard, and Seth Yalcin. For particularly helpful and thorough comments on this paper, I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer from Philosophical Studies. For helpful discussion, I also wish to thank audience members at a meeting of the Reed College Philosophy Colloquium, two meetings of the University of Southern California Speculative Society, and a meeting of the Minnesota Philosophical Society. Most of all, however, I wish to thank Troy Cross, with whom I have had numerous long and insightful conversations on the topic of this paper. Had I not been fortunate enough to receive Troy’s mentorship, this paper would be—if existent at all—substantially worse than it actually is.

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Nguyen, A. The radical account of bare plural generics. Philos Stud 177, 1303–1331 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01254-8

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