1 Generics: A Philosophical Introduction
Francis Jeffry Pelletier · 2009
Abstract This chapter introduces the linguistic phenomena that are called “genericity” (both the so‐called reference to a kind and the characterizing statement types) and shows how they have figured into a wide range of fields, such as ethics and philosophy of science (both within philosophy), commonsense reasoning and nonmonotonic logic (within artificial intelligence), and conversational implicature (within pragmatics). It also discusses the main threads within the formal semantics literature about how generic statements ought to be described.