Aboutness and universal generalization

Abstract

We motivate and present a novel semantic theory for universal generalizations (‘every is a ’), contributing to a growing theoretical line that gives equal prominence to subject matter and truth conditions when modelling propositional content. Our proposed theory aligns with the presently dominant linguistic programme for capturing natural language quantifiers (the generalized quantifier framework) and demonstrably respects a package of influential theses on subject matter (e.g. that a subject matter corresponds to a set of basic questions), many of which extend in interesting and natural ways to the quantified setting. Along the way, we take a principled stand on some divisive issues: most notably, we follow Nelson Goodman in denying that universal generalizations are about individuals, relative to the domain of quantification.