Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Generic Statements

Statements divide into the singular and the general.  General statements divide into the universal, the particular, and the generic. Generic statements are interesting not only to the logician and linguist and philosopher but also to critics of ideology and conservative critics of leftist ideology critique.  For example, leftists will find something 'ideological' about the generic  'Women are nurturing' whereas conservatives will hold that the sentence expresses the plain truth and that some sort of obfuscation and chicanery is involved when  leftists deny this plain biologically-based  truth and try to tie its very meaning to the legitimation and preservation of existing power relations in society.

In this entry, perhaps the first in a series, I confine myself to presenting examples of generic statements and to giving a preliminary exegesis of the linguistic data, noting some features of generic generalizations, and some philosophical questions that arise.

Examples of Generic Statements

Some of the examples are my own, some are culled from the literature. Some of the following are true, some false, and some politically incorrect.  Trigger Warning!  All girly girls and pajama boys out of the seminar room and into their safe spaces! Uncle Bill will visit you later with milk and cookies and cuddly animals.

• Dutchmen are good sailors. (Arnauld)
• Germans are industrious.
• Jews are very intelligent.
• Birds fly. 
• Chickens lay eggs.
• Germans make better soldiers than Italians.
• Cigars are what Bill smokes these days.
• Men are taller than women.
• Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.
• Priests don't ride motorcycles.
• Reducing taxes leads to increased economic growth.
• Turks are hospitable.
• Turks are very bad drivers.
• Analytic philosophers do not know the history of philosophy very well.
• Humanities departments are lousy with leftists.
• The dodo is extinct.
• Schockley invented the transistor.
• The lion has a mane.
• Blacks are not good at deferring gratification.
• Conservatives are racists.
• Women are nurturing and better with children.
• Fred drinks wine with dinner.
• The potato is highly digestible.

Some Features of Generic Statements

One obvious feature of generic statements is that they are not replaceable either salva veritate or salva significatione by either universal or particular quantified statements.  It is true that Germans are industrious, but false that all are.  That some are is true, but 'Some Germans are industrious' does not convey the sense of 'Germans are industrious.'  The generic and the particular generalization agree in truth value but differ in sense.

In a vast number of cases, if I assert that the Fs are Gs I do not mean to endorse the corresponding universal generalization.  No doubt birds fly, but it is false that all birds fly: the penguin is a bird, but it doesn't fly.  And I know that.  So if I say that birds fly, you can't refute me by bringing up the penguin.  And if I say that Italians and those of Italian extraction are frugal and masters of personal finance, which is manifestly true, you cannot refute me by bringing up your cousin Vinny, the spendthrift of Hoboken.  The same goes for 'Humanities departments are lousy with leftists.'   'Chickens lay eggs' has the interesting property that all the roosters strutting around in the world's barnyards cannot counterexample it into falsehood.

It is interesting to note  that one can make a generic statement (express a generic proposition) using a sentence with 'all' or 'every.' My example:  Omnis homo mendax.  'Every man is a liar.'  An assertive utterance of this sentence in normal contexts expresses the proposition that people lie, not the proposition that all people lie.  Or if someone says, unguardedly, or Trumpianly, 'All politicians are crooks,' he won't be fazed if you point out that the late Patrick Daniel Moynihan was no crook.  The speaker may have engaged in a hasty generalization, but then again he may have intended a generic statement.

On the other hand, we sometimes omit the universal quantifier even though the proposition we intend to express is a universal quantification.  An assertive utterance of 'Arguments have premises'  intends Every argument has premises. The possibility of counterexamples is not countenanced.  Contrast this with the generic 'Chickens lay eggs' which is plainly true even though only  hens lay eggs.

'Arguments have premises' is non-generic and elliptical for 'All arguments have premises.'    But what about 'Men are mortal'?  Is it replaceable salva significatione with 'All men are mortal'?  Perhaps not, perhaps it is a generic statement that admits of exceptions, as generics typically do.  After all, Christ was a man but he was not mortal inasmuch as he was also God. 

A clearer example is 'Man is bipedal.'  This cannot be replaced salva veritate by 'All men are bipedal' since the latter is false.  Nor can it be replaced salva significatione by 'Some man is bipedal, which, though plainly true, is not what 'Man is bipedal' means.  And the same holds for translations using the quantifiers 'many' and 'most'  and 'almost all.'

We are tempted to say that 'Man is bipedal' by its very sense cannot be about individual humans, whether all of them, most of them, many of them, or some of them,  but must be about a common generic essence that normal, non-defective humans instantiate.  But how could this be?  No generic essence has two feet.  It is always only an individual man that has or lacks two feet.  Here, then, is one of the philosophical puzzles that arise when we think about generic statements.  It is the problem of what generic statements are about, which is not to be confused with the question whether they have truth makers.

And then there is 'Man is a rational animal.'  Let us agree that to be rational is either to possess the capacity to reason or to possess the second-order capacity to develop this first-order capacity.  Aristotle's dictum is true, while 'All humans are rational animals' is false.  So Aristotle's dictum is a generic sentence that cannot be replaced by a quantified sentence. It is false that all humans are rational animals because an anencephalic human fetus, while obviously human (not bovine, canine, etc.), having as it does human parents, is not rational in the sense defined.

And of course we cannot replace 'Man is a rational animal' with 'Most men are rational animals.'  For the dictum plainly intends something like: it the nature or essence of man to be rational.  What then is the dictum about?  If you tell me that it is about the generic essence man, then I will point out the obvious: no abstract object reasons, is capable of reasoning, or has the potentiality to acquire the power to reason.  

Some philosophers hold that every truth has a truth-maker.  What then are the truth-makers for the vast class of true generics?  Do they have any? 

REFERENCE

Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, de Gruyter, 2015, Chapter 8, "Generic Statements," pp. 151-168.

Is Beef Food?

Beef is the flesh of a formerly sentient being, a dead cow.  And of course beef is edible.  For present purposes, to be edible is to be ingestible by mastication, swallowing, etc., non-poisonous,  and sufficiently nutritious to sustain human life.

But is everything that is edible food?  Obviously not: your pets and your children are edible but they are not food.  People don't feed their pets and children to fatten them up for slaughter.  So while all food is edible, not everything edible is food.

What then is the missing 'ingredient'? What must be added to the edible to make it food?  We must move from merely biological concern with human animals and the nutrients necessary to keep them alive to the cultural and normative.  Sally Haslanger: "Food, I submit, is a cultural and normative category." ("Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground," Chapter 11 of Feminist Metaphysics, 192)

This is surely on the right track, though I would add that food is not merely cultural and normative.  Food, we can agree, is what it is socially acceptable to eat and/or morally permissible to eat.  But food, to be food, must be material stuff ingestible by material beings, and so cannot be in toto a social or cultural construct.  Or do you want to say that potatoes in the ground are social constructs?  I hope not.  Haslanger seems to accept my obvious point, as witness her remark to the effect that one cannot chow down on aluminum soda cans. As she puts it, "not just anything could count as food."(192)  No construing of aluminum cans, social or otherwise, could make them edible to humans.

Could it be that certain food stuffs are by nature food, and not by convention?  Could it be that the flesh of certain non-human animals such as cows  is by nature food for humans?  If beef is by nature food for humans, then it is normal in the normative sense for humans to eat beef, and thus morally acceptable that they eat it.  Of course, what it is morally acceptable to eat need not be morally obligatory to eat.

Haslanger rejects the moral acceptability of eating beef but I don't quite find an argument against it, at least not in the article under examination.  What she does is suggest how someone could come to accept the (to her) mistaken view that it is morally acceptable to eat meat.  Given that 'Beef is food' is a generic statement, one will be tempted to accept the pragmatic or conversational implicature that "there is something about the nature of beef (or cows) that makes it food." (192) 

For Haslanger, 'Beef is food' is in the close conceptual vicinity of 'Sagging pants are cool' and 'Women wear lipstick.'  

Surely there is nothing intrinsic to sagging pants that makes them 'cool': 'coolness' is a relational property had by sagging pants in virtue of their being regarded as 'cool' by certain individuals.  It is not in the nature of pants to sag such that non-sagging pants would count as sartorially defective.  We can also easily agree that it is it not in the nature of women to wear lipstick such that non-lipstick-wearing women such as Haslanger are defective women in the way that a cat born with only three legs is a defective cat, an abnormal cat in both the normative and statistical senses of 'abnormal.'  One can be a real woman, a good woman, a non-defective woman without wearing lipstick.

These fashion examples, which could be multiplied ad libitum (caps worn backward or sideways, high heels, etc.), are clear.  What is not clear is why 'Beef is food' and 'Cows are food'  are  like the fashion examples rather than like such examples as 'Cats are four-legged' and 'Humans are rational.'

Cats are four-legged by nature, not by social construction. Accordingly, a three-legged cat is a defective cat.  As such, it is no counterexample to the truth that cats are four-legged.  'Cats are four-legged' is presumably about a generic essence, one that has normative 'bite':  a good cat, a normal cat has four legs. 'Cats are four-legged' is not replaceable salva veritate by 'All cats are four-legged.'

Why isn't 'Cows are food' assimilable to 'Cats are four-legged' rather than to 'Sagging pants are cool'?  I am not finding an argument. Haslanger denies that "cows are for eating, that beef just is food":

Given that I believe this to be a pernicious and morally damaging assumption, it is reasonable for me to block the implicature by denying the claim: cows are not food. I would even be willing to say that beef is not food. (192)

Beef is not food for Haslanger because raising and slaughtering cows to eat their flesh is an "immoral human practice."  But what exactly is the argument here?  Where's the beef? Joking aside, what is the argument to the conclusion that eating beef is immoral?

There isn't one.  She just assumes that eating beef is immoral.  In lieu of an argument she provides a psycholinguistic explanation of how one might come to think that beef is food.

The explanation is that people believe that beef is food because they accept a certain pragmatic implicature, namely the one from 'Beef is food' to 'Beef has a nature that makes it food.'  The inferential slide is structurally the same as the one from 'Sagging pants are cool' to 'There is something in the nature of sagging pants that grounds their intrinsic coolness.'

Now it is obvious that the pragmatic implicature is bogus is the fashion examples.  To assume that it is also bogus in the beef example is to beg the question.  

We noted that not everything edible is food.  To be food, a stuff must not only be edible; it must also be socially acceptable to eat it. Food is "a cultural and normative category." (192)  But Haslanger admits that "cows are food, given existing social practices." (193)  So beef is, as a matter of fact, food.  To have a reason to overturn the existing social practices, Haslanger need to give us a reason why eating beef is immoral -- which she hasn't done.