Characterizing Kinds A Semantics for Generic Sentences Matt Teichman October 27, 2015 Acknowledgments There is no question that Melina Avery deserves my heartfelt thanks for living through this project with me over the past few years. We met as it was in its formative stages, and I could not have asked for a more thoughtful or sensitive partner. It is no trivial undertaking to be in the company of someone who is writing a dissertation, and I must say she pulled it off with impeccable grace. If better people write better dissertations, then you primarily have her to thank for making me into a better person. I am also especially eager to thank my parents, Harold Teichman and Susan Davis, for far more than can be fit into an acknowledgements section. Throughout my early life, at great personal and financial cost to themselves, they made it their top priority to secure for me the best education they possibly could. And throughout my adult life, they have regu- larly gone beyond the call of duty when it came to nurturing my varied intellectual interests. When I developed an interest in philosophy, right at the tail end of my undergraduate ca- reer, it was my father who told me about Frege’s work, bought me copies of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Anscombe’s Intention, and Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, and urged me to take my first logic course. When I first developed a serious interest in Wittgenstein, it was he who patiently dissected the rule following argument, the private language argument, and the remarks on pain for me. When I took my first ever graduate seminar in philosophy, then as an outsider to the discipline, I frequently had to phone home for help, but I was able to get myself up to speed remarkably quickly, thanks to his formidable erudition in phi- losophy, mathematics, the German language, physics, poetry, and countless other subjects. For this unofficial second education, which formed the perfect complement to my formal education, I am profoundly grateful. During those late undergraduate years, I was a dual major in linguistics and cinema studies, about to pursue graduate work in cinema studies on avant-garde film. My first ever philosophy course, on aesthetics, was with Christopher Williams, who did an excellent job of introducing me to the art of drawing subtle logical distinctions between superficially similar philosophical positions. It was Molly Diesing, Junko Shimoyama, and Dorit Abusch who gave me my first introduction to the philosophy of language as an undergraduate, and I am sure that my take on the field has been strongly influenced by their respective ap- i ii proaches. And it was Greg Salmieri who introduced to me both to ancient philosophy and to the history of philosophy more broadly. Although it may not be immediately apparent from the direction my research has taken, my overall philosophical world picture derives much of its inspiration from the ancient Greeks. Even today, my views about how philo- sophical activity integrates into the rest of human life take Greg’s important work in this area as their point of departure. As my graduate work in cinema studies progressed, an interest in systematically char- acterizing the differences between film interpretation and linguistic interpretation led me to draw more and more on contemporary scholarship in philosophy, and before I knew it, my research had evolved into something that it only really made sense to pursue in a philosophy department. When I finally decided to make the transition from one academic discipline to another, John McDowell, Lucy Fischer, Nicholas Rescher, Greg Salmieri, Cathy Legg, Ronald A. T. Judy, John Whitman, and Abigail Cohn were particularly forthcoming with practical advice on how best to do so. It was on McDowell and Rescher’s strong recommendation that I ended up choosing the University of Chicago, and it was thanks to the superlatively warm support of my cinema studies supervisor, Lucy Fischer, that I was able to transition smoothly. Upon my arrival in Chicago, I was instantly made to feel at home in a vibrant commu- nity of first-rate graduate students, each of whom had an impressive combination of diverse philosophical interests and exhibited an desire to share their ideas with others. During my first few years in the program I had a roommate named Mark Hopwood, who it could be said spent much of that time effectively training me to live. Somehow, over scores of extensive powwows that can only be characterized as epic, and despite his downright comical lack of interest in every area of philosophy that I work on, he managed to teach me a nontrivial proportion of what I currently know about the field, along with a substantial proportion of what I currently know about politics, history, and religion. How I managed to talk him into creating a podcast with me is anyone’s guess. During this same period, I was also especially lucky to have access to Aidan Gray and Peter Klecha, under whose intellectual mentorship I was introduced to recent work in the philosophy of language, and with whom I spent numerous hours considering various hypotheses as to the explanatory purport of semantic theories. The deep connections be- tween my previous philosophical interests and this exciting new material were immediately apparent, and before long, I was a regular attendee of the Semantics and Philosophy of Lan- guage workshop. Today, Aidan and Peet are still the first people I turn to when I feel my understanding of human language needs to be deepened. My decision to specialize in the philosophy of language became definitive after I took Chris Kennedy’s introductory graduate seminar on semantics. Although I had been exposed iii to basic compositional semantics as an undergraduate, most of the content of this course was new to me. Chris has an unbelievable degree of spontaneous energy in the classroom; he thrusts his students right into the thick of the most difficult foundational debates in the field, but in such a way as to make them seem somehow tractable. Each class session of his is impeccably organized, while also retaining a strong improvisational character. I recall one instance in which he asked: ‘Which theory of syntactic movement would you rather use? The trace or the copy theory? It’s all the same to me.’ Someone requested that we adopt the copy theory, and the entire trajectory of the rest of the course was instantly reconfigured, including the content of all subsequent homework exercises. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that level of extemporaneity in a class ever since. Shortly thereafter, I sat in on two excellent formal semantics seminars taught by Ita- mar Francez, wherein we covered such fascinating topics as modality, concealed questions, dynamic semantics, and intensional transitives. One year later, he graciously offered to guide me through an unofficial independent study in the canonical works of that tradition. My entire dissertation topic sprung into existence one afternoon as a result of a conversation I had with him. And a year after that, thanks to the generous letter-writing efforts of Gabriel Lear, Chris Kennedy, and Kevin Davey, I was awarded a Fulbright IIE grant to study logic and semantics in the Netherlands. It would be difficult to overstate how formative this period was for me. The Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation is incomparable to any other academic environment I’ve come across. The disciplinary demarcations that dictate the way nearly every intel- lectual problem is conceived of in the US barely exist there. At the ILLC, researchers in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, computer science, and engineering think nothing of publishing, teaching graduate seminars, or putting on conferences in each other’s fields. In the US, interdisciplinarity typically involves a professor in one department co-authoring a paper with a professor in a different department. But in Amsterdam, it runs much deeper. Most of the work done there is impossible to fit into the familiar academic tax- onomy; one has the sense that it could be published in any one of five fields, modulo small variations in terminology. I am reminded of Michel Foucault, who was told by philosophers that he was trying to pass history off as philosophy, and by historians that he was trying to pass philosophy off as history. In my view, to be on the receiving end of such accusations is as sure a sign as any that one must be doing something right. My entire stay in Amsterdam was a success, but my meetings with Frank Veltman, my faculty sponsor while abroad, are particularly worthy of mention. Over a period of one academic year, he helped me solidify my sense of how the standard rubric of topics in mathematical logic hooks up with the standard rubric of topics in formal semantics. And although my inclinations tend in a metaphysical rather than epistemic direction, he has probably had more of an influence on the way I conceive of normality than anyone else. In iv a less official capacity, I have Facundo Carriero, my roommate for the first four months of my visit, to thank for teaching me most of what I currently know about logic, programming, and how to set up an operating system. Though he would surely insist otherwise, I think it’s clear that he is a philosopher at heart. I returned to Chicago in the Spring of 2012, highly energized for dissertation writing. Billy Cobham has said that the Bitches Brew sessions with Miles Davis were an exciting new challenge for him, because whereas previously he’d shared a recording booth with no more than one piano genius at a time, now he was expected to keep up with three.