Disimplicature

Speranza

The project of Grice's unpublication is to deliver a semantics for a broad subset of bare plural generics about racial kinds, a class which I will dub ‘Type C generics.’ Examples include ‘Blacks are criminal’ and ‘Muslims are terrorists.’ Type C generics have two interesting features. First, they link racial kinds with socially perspectival predicates. SPPs lead interpreters to treat the relationship between kinds and predicates in generic constructions as nomic or non-accidental. Moreover, in computing their content, interpreters must make implicit reference to socially privileged perspectives which are treated as authoritative about whether a given object fits into the extension of the predicate. Such deference grants these authorities influence over both the conventional meaning of these terms and over the nature of the objects in the social ontology that these terms purport to describe, much the way a baseball umpire is authoritative over the meaning and metaphysics of ‘strike’/strike. Second, ter...