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-To my ear, the generic reading is correct. I think the best evidence for this is simply the undistorted judgments of ordinary speakers. No competent speaker of English would, without distorting influence or additional evidence of generalizability, endorse an inference from a plan involving two just governments to the resolution. Suppose Sally, an American citizen, believes that the U.S. and Canada should require employers to pay a living wage, but that no other government (just or unjust, actual or possible) should. She would not represent her view by asserting, “Just governments ought to require that employers pay a living wage.” She would deny this claim and hold that the U.S. and Canada are exceptions. One might object that Sally would endorse this assertion if she believed that the U.S. and Canada are the only just governments. Maybe she would, but that is explained by the generic reading, because she would then be making a generalization about (what she believes to be) just governments. And the onus would be on the affirmative, when specifying particular governments, to add such a premise. Moreover, many linguists would add that Sally could not regard it is as mere accident that these governments are just and that they ought to require employers to pay a living wage: the resolution requires there to be some explanatory connection between the justness of governments and the living wage requirement (Carlson 2005, see). This is good evidence because ordinary speakers have an implicit (but not infallible) mastery over the language in which the resolution is stated. The resolution is stated in English, not in some special debate-specific dialect of English. Facts of usage constrain interpretation. The existential interpretation is not even, as I see it, eligible. So its pragmatic benefits are irrelevant. Compare: I think it would be better if the resolution were, “It is not the case that just governments ought to …” But that’s not the resolution, so it’s not even an eligible interpretation in a T debate. (Here I assume a controversial view about whether pragmatic benefits can justify a semantically inadequate interpretation of the resolution. I cannot defend this view here, but I welcome questions and objections in the comments to be addressed in a later article.) |