Introduction: Our Judgments of Generics
Generics are sentences that express generalizations about kinds, such as “tigers are striped,” “ducks lay eggs,” and “ticks carry Lyme disease.”Quantified sentences such as “all tigers are striped,” “most barns are red,” and “some ticks carry Lyme disease” can also express generalizations about kinds, but unlike generics, they convey information about how many members of the kind have the property in question. Quantified statements have proved highly amenable to semantic analysis—for example, “all tigers are striped” is true just in case the set of tigers is included in the set of striped things. More generally, quantified statements depend solely on straightforward content-neutral information—of the sort that can be represented in set-theoretic terms—and as a result can be readily analyzed using the standard tools of formal semantics (e.g. Barwise & Cooper, 1981).
In contrast to quantified statements, generics have proved difficult for semantic...