The harmful feature of generics

Various experimental studies (especially Gelman et al. 2010, and Rhodes et al. 2012) provided evidence that generics (namely, sentences like “birds fly” and “ducks lay eggs”) promote the essentialization of the categories they are about. That is, generics lead to believe that the categories they are about have an underlying nature responsible for the similarities among the category members. In this dissertation, I’m interested in what linguistic features of generics, if any, make them particularly suited to promote the essentialization of the categories they are about. To do that, I rely on Sally Haslanger's (2011, 2012, 2014) proposal, according to which generics convey that the connection between the members of the category (Ks) and the predicated property (F) “holds primarily by virtue of some important fact about the Ks as such” (Haslanger 2012: 450). In the first chapter, I provide some linguistic background and I identify my the target of my research. I’m not concerned with all the sentences that have been referred to as “generic”, but only on what Bernhard Nickel (2016) calls “characteristic generic”, and only with those that have a Bare Plural subject NP. In the second chapter, I present Ariel Cohen’s (1996) semantics of generics. His theory accounts for the statistic variability of generics on probabilistic grounds. As I will argue, it is a merit of this theory that it makes no reference to normality. The third chapter is devoted to the topic of essentialism. I present Leslie’s hypothesis that generics foster the essentialization of the categories they are about and some empirical evidence supporting it. Then, I present Jennifer Saul’s (2017) objection to these experiments and I argue that a better understanding of the phenomenon is needed. Finally, I take into account Haslanger’s proposal. I show how it can account for two phenomena: the promotion of essentialization and the different generalizations generics can convey. I conclude the chapter by pointing out that Haslanger doesn’t take a stand on whether the robustness proposition is a presupposition or an implicature. Investigating this point is the main aim of the fourth chapter. Here I introduce presuppositions and implicatures with their features and distinctions. Then, I apply the linguistic tests, concluding that the robustness proposition is a generalized conversational implicature. I proceed by presenting Levinson’s theory, which I employ to explain how the implicature arises. In the last section, I discuss the explanatory implicature. The fifth and last chapter explores alternative explanations and the consequences of the results of chapter four. I exclude that the robustness proposition is implicated by utterances involving kind terms and I argue that it is derived through abduction with some quantified sentences. I then take into account the hypothesis, predicted by Levinson’s theory, that quantified sentences convey an implicature complementary to the one of generics. I show that this is not the case and that quantified sentences are not the only marked form lacking the complementary implicature predicted by Levinson’s principles: technical terms and extended expressions do not convey it either. Based on this data, I propose a revision of Levinson’s M-principle which, as I show, does not predict that quantified sentences, technical terms, and extended expressions convey a complementary implicature. I conclude the chapter by motivating why the robustness proposition cannot be a clausal implicature.