Disimplicature

Speranza

A prevailing thought among Griceians is that "generics," as Griceians call them, have a covert modal operator at logical form. 

("Everything has a logical form!" Grice once shouted to Strawson. "By that I implicate that if you cannot PUT what you say in logical form, what you say is not worth saying!")

Grice claims that if this is right, the covert generic modality is a weak necessity modal. 

We may provide evidence for this claim as we sketch a theory. 

In particular, we may show that there are some important distributional parallels between generics and sentences with overt weak necessity modals: 

both sorts of sentences share behaviour in nonmonotonic reasoning environments and also lack genuine epistemic readings. 

Grice's favourite example was: "Tweetie ain't no penguin!"

Acknowledging these parallels and the connection here is in the service of both our understanding of genericity and of weak necessity. 

Finally, we may propose an understanding of generics as involving a covert weak necessity modal and further argue that this is a promising path to pursue in relation to different issues related to the interpretation of generics.

Or not, of course!