Normal Objects, Normal Worlds and the Meaning of Generic Sentences

Abstract

It has sometimes been proposed that generic sentences make statements about prototypic members of a category. In this paper I will elaborate this view and develop an account where generic sentences express quantification about the normal exemplars in a category - here and in counterfactual worlds sufficiently similar to our own. Comparing the account to the currently most widespread analysis which views generic sentences as universal quantifications in carefully chosen best-possible worlds, we find that an analysis that is based on the choice of normal objects does better justice to the data in question than an analysis that relies on a choice of normal worlds alone. A further conceptual advantage of an explicit separation of (a) a choice of best exemplars and (b) a modal component of generic quantification consists in the fact that it highlights that different generic sentences can rely on different kinds of choice of best exemplar. Comparing their logical behaviour, I will demonstrate that we should at least distinguish between normal-generic sentences and ideal-generic sentences. Finally, the paper proves that the account I propose is a modal variant of some recent purely extensional default logics, developed in AL.