Between logic and the world : an integrated theory of generics / Bernhard Nickel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nickel, Bernhard, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Genericalness (Linguistics).

Physical Description:

277 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Between logic & the world

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

What do we mean when we say that ravens are black, that lions have manes, or that sea-turtles are long-lived? What cognitive achievement, actual or imagined, do we give voice to when we speak this way? We're abstracting from individuals to characterize the kinds as such, but what does that actually amount to? Statistical approaches, though they provide extremely successful models of many aspects of our cognitive lives, cannot do justice to the subtlety of our kind-directed thought and talk. Between Logic and the World argues that generics are fundamentally not a statistical but an explanatory phenomenon. The book closely integrates a semantic account of our kind-focused language with a metaphysical theory of the facts we are trying to capture, and it shows that large swaths of our cognitive lives are concerned with fitting the phenomena we encounter into explanatory structures and patterns. Generics are the most visible manifestations of this fundamental cognitive aim. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Two Conceptions of Kinds 1

1.2 A First Glance at the Theory 4

1.3 Generics and the Viability of Formal Semantics 8

1.4 A Note to the Reader 12

2 Genericity and Generics 13

2.1 Genericity and Generics 13

2.2 The Range of Data 19

2.3 Skeptical Worries: Loose Talk 26

2.4 Semantics 31

2.5 Summary 47

Part I Semantics

3 The Basic Semantics 51

3.1 Normality 52

3.2 Respects 56

3.3 Ways 61

3.4 Modal Import 67

3.5 The Logic of Generics: Kind Percolation 69

3.6 Summary 79

4 Other Recent Work 80

4.1 Primitive Projective Propensities (Leslie) 81

4.2 Probabilities (Cohen) 91

4.3 Vagueness and Modality (Greenberg) 100

4.4 Natural-Historical Judgments (Thompson) 105

4.5 Summary 111

5 Logical Complexity 112

5.1 And 113

5.2 Not and Homogeneity 127

5.3 Or 131

5.4 Summary 142

6 Genericity and Gradability 143

6.1 Good 144

6.2 Better 151

6.3 Defending the Truth-Conditions 160

6.4 Patterns in the Data 162

6.5 Cohen and Relative Generics 164

6.6 Summary 172

Part II Normality

7 A Definition of Normality 177

7.1 Characteristic Properties 178

7.2 Mechanisms and the Transition to Normality 196

7.3 Kind-Derived Groups 202

7.4 Raw Materials for Semantic Interactions 208

7.5 Summary 212

8 Linguistics-A Case Study 214

8.1 Three Conceptions of the Subject Matter of Linguistics 215

8.2 Deference 232

8.3 Summary 243

9 Coda: Onward, Upward, Inward, Outward 244

Part III Appendices.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199640003

0199640009

OCLC:

947095586