Abstract
Are sagging pants cool? Are cows food? Are women more submissive than men? Are blacks more criminal than whites? Taking the social world at face value, many people would be tempted to answer these questions in the affirmative. And if challenged, they can point to facts that support their answers. But there is something wrong about the affirmative answers. In this chapter, I draw on recent ideas in the philosophy of language and metaphysics to show how the assertion of a generic claim of the sort in question ordinarily permits one to infer that the fact in question obtains by virtue of something specifically about the subject so described, i.e., about women, or blacks, or sagging pants. In the examples I’ve offered, however, this implication inference is unwarranted. The facts in question obtain by virtue of broad system of social relations within which the subjects are situated, and are not grounded in intrinsic or dispositional features of the subjects themselves. The background relations are obscured, however, and as a result, the assertion is at least systematically misleading; a denial functions to block the problematic implication. Revealing such implications or presuppositions and blocking them is a crucial part of ideology critique.
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- 1.
Especially useful discussions of the notion of ideology include Geuss, Fields, McCarthy, Purvis and Hunt, and Shelby.
- 2.
Although there is much controversy over the question whether “ideology” or the Foucauldian notion of “discourse” is better suited to the role described here, the controversies are not directly relevant to my purposes. Moreover, there seems to be a core notion shared by both. See Purvis and Hunt.
- 3.
Sometimes ideologies are taken to be sets of beliefs, sometimes forms of “practical consciousness,” that reside in the minds of individual agents; sometimes they are cultural phenomena presupposed somehow in collective social life; sometimes they are explicit theories articulated by politicians, philosophers and religious figures, among others. The causal or explanatory role of ideology within a broader social theory is also unclear (Geuss; Elster 468–9; Marx 36–7; Althusser).
- 4.
Note that this is a different claim from one saying that the generic is about the kind, e.g., dodos are extinct. See Leslie, “Generics” 5, fn 3. Generics seem to be concerned with open-ended generalizations. Enumerative generalizations and open-ended generalizations differ in ways that matter for confirmation and induction: “this coin in my pocket is silver” doesn’t inductively confirm “all coins in my pocket are silver” because it doesn’t lend credibility to the untested cases. In addition, there are a number of issues concerning the use of bare plurals that deserve consideration (Carlson). In some cases, bare plurals seem to have existential rather than generalizing force, e.g., “he grew tomatoes in that plot,” or “flour moths have invaded my kitchen.” I will only be considering the generic bare plural.
- 5.
I’m actually not sure whether it is better to consider it an implication or a presupposition. I’m willing to adjust my account to accommodate evidence for either. My goal in this paper is programmatic and I am aware that much more work needs to be done on the details.
- 6.
In (“Generics” 43), Leslie suggests that if the attributed property is true of almost all of the kind (almost all tigers have stripes), and there are no positive counterinstances (it is not the case that the tigers who don’t have stripes have bold pink spots), then the characteristic generic is true. However, the role of positive counterinstances is more complex, for there may be abnormal counterinstances (albino tigers) that do not defeat the generalization (Leslie, private communication), so the better account will need to rely on some notion of what’s a good example of the kind.
- 7.
A different hypothesis worth considering is that the striking property generics are picking out a feature that is remarkable or important in the context. This differs from Leslie’s proposal in two ways: the feature may not be dangerous or harmful, and what properties are eligible vary from context to context. For example, Cohen (“Think Generic!”) provides a contrastive account on which (roughly) generics are true just in case they attribute a property to a kind that is more likely to hold of members of that kind than the alternative that is salient in the context. Leslie argues against Cohen’s account in (“Generics” 10–12), though others defend versions of it (Carr, “Generics”).
- 8.
For example, Leslie rightly points out that there is an asymmetry in how generics are responsive to counterinstances. Recall that “birds lay eggs” is true, even though there are a substantial number of counterexamples (the male and non-fertile female birds). “Birds are female,” however, is false, even though there are almost as many counterexamples. Leslie proposes that in the case of “birds are female,” the non-female birds manifest a positive alternative, viz., being male, whereas in the “birds lay eggs” case, it is not the case that there is another form of reproduction in place of laying eggs. If some birds gave birth to live young, then “birds lay eggs” would be false. “There is an intuitive difference between simply lacking a feature and lacking it in virtue of having another, equally memorable, feature instead” (“Generics” 35). She draws the conclusion that generics are highly sensitive to whether the counterinstances to the claim are positive or negative (33–7).
- 9.
In contemporary metaphysics, this notion of objectual essence (the essence of objects) has been reframed in terms of an object’s essential or necessary properties. An object’s essential properties are all and only those it could not exist without; its accidental properties are those that it has but might not have had. So, I am essentially a living being, but only accidentally a mother. I am interested in notions of essence that are not best understood as a set of necessary properties but are closer to the idea of natures that may be realized more or less fully (Fine, Correia).
- 10.
In Aristotle’s terms, the substantial form is the essence, the matter has the essence, and the matter together with the essence constitutes the material object. The species is the matter and form “taken generally.” I’m using the term “kind” in the first part of this paragraph as roughly equivalent to “substantial form,” but I quickly revert to a more ordinary notion of “kind.”
- 11.
Rae Langton has argued that presupposition accommodation may also require accommodation of desire and other attitudes. See Langton, “Beyond Belief”.
- 12.
It is a difficult and contested matter how to distinguish what enters the common ground through implicature and what enters through presupposition. For my purposes, little hinges on this; what matters is that the common ground can be updated in ways that are not explicit and need not even be noticed by the audience or speaker. I will use the model of implicature to account for the examples we’re looking at, but it may be that they are better handled differently.
- 13.
I recommend Horn (esp. §2) for a full discussion of metalinguistic negation with examples of some interest to feminists, e.g., “She’s not a lady, she’s a woman!” or “She’s not an uppity broad, she’s a strong, vibrant woman!”
- 14.
This seems a quite straightforward claim for template generics and striking generics; it is less clear for ordinary generics. It is more plausible if the subject of the ordinary generic is a basic-level kind (Leslie, “Generics”), and referred to by a term that makes the kind explicit. In such cases the correlation between the kind and the selected property seems to call for explanation in terms of the kind’s nature.
- 15.
More needs to be said about what it is to be a “source” of truth. I’m drawing on Fine.
- 16.
The semantics of generics may be as complex as Leslie describes, or much simpler. I’m sympathetic with Leslie’s view but I am not taking a stand on the semantics here. I believe that my claims about the pragmatics are compatible with several different accounts of the semantics.
- 17.
More should be said about why it is plausible that this presupposition or implicature is added to the common ground. Relevant support includes (i) further arguments for the value of the default mode of generalization and its connection to generics, (ii) further arguments concerning the relation between generics and inductive inference, (iii) the application of Gricean maxims of relevance and quantity, and (iv) the idea that the grammatically simpler a statement, the more paradigmatic the phenomenon described is implicated to be (Levinson).
- 18.
This example was raised and discussed in a graduate seminar devoted to this topic at MIT. My memory does not allow me to thank each individual for their particular contribution, so thanks to the group (all mentioned in the paper’s acknowledgements) for help with this case.
- 19.
Thanks to Mahrad Almotahari for this example.
- 20.
Thanks to Jennifer Carr for this example and suggestions for how to handle it.
- 21.
This example is worth much more discussion than I will provide here. In particular, it is not clear how to understand the term “beef”. Is beef just a slab of dead cow flesh? Or does it include as part of its meaning that the cow flesh is prepared (perhaps even just cut) in a way suitable for eating? Would a slab of cow flesh found on the road after a cow’s collision with a truck be rightly called “beef”? I am intending to be provocative here, though I also have a more substantive point: within the Aristotelian tradition, some natures must be understood functionally. Eyes are for seeing. I believe that it is characteristic of omnivores that they regard the slabs of flesh they consume as food, which is to say that they just are for eating. This is, I submit, to be mistaken about what they really are.
- 22.
I discuss Hacking on “looping” kinds also in Haslanger, “Ontology” and Haslanger, “Social”. See also Langton, “Speaker’s Freedom”.
- 23.
The contrast between indifferent and interactive kinds is not a simple binary distinction, for there are several different factors that may play a role determining whether a kind is more or less indifferent or interactive. One factor is the degree to which we can have, and have had, a causal impact on members of the kind; in cases where we have had a causal impact, a further issue is whether the similarity amongst the members that forms the basis for the kind is due to our influence.
- 24.
I am not in a position to argue for a theory of the truth conditions for generics; in fact, I want to avoid taking a stand on the semantics of generics (though I admit that the line between semantics and pragmatics is unclear). My suggestion has been, however, that the generic essence claim is only pragmatically involved. If this is true, then whether Bert’s statement “blacks are violent,” is false will depend on our semantic account and complicated facts about how we want to explain the apparent violence of (some) blacks. For example, if there is an explanation of black violence in terms of a response to racist oppression, then there may be a non-accidental correlation which would allow the generic to be true as a striking generic even if only a very few blacks are violent; but we will be right to resist or deny it by virtue of how it affects the common ground. The interlocutor’s denial is a “meta-linguistic negation” that blocks the implicature that blacks are by nature violent. This is also relevant in the case of fashion because we may want it to be true that a fashion item is cool even if we don’t grant the essentialist claim.
- 25.
There is empirical evidence that we are aware of the distinction between majority and characteristic generics. In the case of characteristic generics, speakers are more willing to count both bare plural and indefinite singular forms of the generic as natural to assert than majority generics, e.g., “tigers have stripes” and “a tiger has stripes” are both judged assertable, whereas speakers are more likely to differ in their assessment of “barns are red” and “a barn is red” (Leslie et al.,“Conceptual” 482).
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Sean Aas, Mahad Almotahari, Lauren Ashwell, Laura Beeby, Sara Bernstein, Elizabeth Camp, Jennifer Carr, Candice Delmas, Melissa Fusco, Mark Johnston, Rae Langton, Heather Logue, Elisa Mai, Kate Manne, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Emily McWilliams, Susan Sauvé Meyer, Charles More, Wendy Salkin, Paulina Sliwa, Judith Thomson, Michael Weisberg, and Stephen Yablo for helpful conversations on the topic of the chapter. Thanks to Sarah-Jane Leslie and Charlotte Witt for excellent comments on an earlier draft and to Elizabeth Harman who served as a commentator when I presented this work as part of the Seybert Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, March 2010. Thanks also to other members of the audience at Penn and at the “Workshop on Generics and Bias” at MIT, May 2010.
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Haslanger, S. (2011). Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground. In: Witt, C. (eds) Feminist Metaphysics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3783-1_11
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