Friday, September 29, 2006

Generics and Quantifiers

so, tonight i went to a semantics workshop here at rutgers in the cognitive science department where i heard a talk by sarah-jane leslie on generics, e.g. generalizations such as 'tigers are striped'.

in her paper "generics and the structure of the mind", she tries to lay out conditions for predicting the truth conditions of generic statements. statements like 'ravens are black' and 'tigers are striped' appear to be true, even if there are instances of non-striped tigers, e.g. albino tigers.

sarah then says that we may be tempted to think of generics as employing quantifiers, i.e. a generic 'Fs are G' is true if some Fs are G. but this gives the wrong truth conditions in some instances, e.g. 'birds are female'. sarah takes this to show that generics are more basic than quantifiers.

also, statements such as 'mosquitoes carry the west nile virus' also seem true, even though less than 1 % of mosquitoes actually carry the virus.

sarah points out that children are actually able to use generics at a very early stage in their linguistic development which suggests that there is an early development of a mechanism in our cognitive structure for making these types of generalizations .

sarah lists four features of this mechanism:

1. it identifies 'characteristic dimensions', i.e. things that are characteristically true of natural kinds, with dimensions of regularities, e.g. 'ducks lay eggs'
2. it looks for a 'good predictor' of the property being generalized where the propery in question is particularly striking, e.g 'sharks attack bathers', comes out true even though only relatively few sharks actually have attacked bathers, .
3.when not dealing with instances of (1) or (2), a majority of Fs must be G in order for the generic to be true, e.g. 'barns are red',
4. where an exception to the generalization occurs, the generic is true if the case of a negative counterinstance, e.g. 'birds lay eggs' is true, though male birds do not lay eggs. but in the case of positive counterinstances, the generic seems to be false. peacocks have fabulously blue tails' is true though female peacocks do not possess blue tails, but have unimpressive stumps. if it were the case that female peacocks had fabulous pink tails, then we could not make a true utterance with 'peacocks have fabulous blue tails' but would have to utter instead, 'peacocks have fabulous blue or pink tails'.

i found the talk very interesting, though i'm not entirely sure her account is satisfactory. i can't put my finger on what is bothering me yet. i will have to think more about it.

greetings!

hello world! my name is luvell anderson and i am a first year graduate student in philosophy at rutgers university. at the moment i am interested primarily in pragmatics in philosophy of language and issues about identity in social and political philosophy, but i have a considerably wide area of interests which is ever widening as i learn more and more.