Tom Ralston

Predicates such as 'are extinct' or 'are widespread' have long been assumed to apply only to kinds. I present evidence that the predicates typically described as kind-level are numerous-type collective predicates, based on their interaction with all and their failure to exhibit homogeneity effects. This undermines the principal semantic motivation for analysing their bare plural arguments as kind-denoting. Instead, I argue that their arguments are type e expressions and that plural kind predication is just plural predication. I give a compositional semantics for bare plurals and explain differences between bare and definite plurals in terms of the situation argument that can restrict their domain. To appear in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 30.

It is widely accepted that generics express law-like generalisations, on the basis of evidence that their truth does not depend only on how things are in the actual world at one moment in time. In this paper, I propose a temporal truthmaker semantics for generics and argue that 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 the unarticulated constituent ‘GEN’ or a domain of abstract kinds. Instead, it can be explained by the nature of the states which make generics true, which may be either generic facts about a category, or particular facts about the instances of a category.

Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing a theory of the meaning of generics, since it takes speakers’ judgments at face value and ignores the non-semantic factors that might affect these judgments. Leslie’s theory therefore overfits the data of our linguistic intuitions. I present a reconceptualised version of the Psychological Theory of Generics as a theory of how heuristics affect our judgements of the truth values of generics and discuss the application of this reconceptualised theory to some of the puzzles posed by generics, including their apparent content-sensitivity, their inferential asymmetry and their association with stereotyping and prejudice.