What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn’t use slurs; we should use ‘rape’ to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with ‘rape’), or adding brand new word-meaning pairs (as with ‘sexual harassment’). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that’s a feature, not a bug, of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language.

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This article discusses recent theories of the meaning of generics. The discussion is centred on how the theories differ in their approach to addressing the primary difficulty in providing a theory of generic meaning: The notoriously complex ways in which the truth conditions of generics seem to vary. In addition, the article summarizes considerations for and against each theory.

Leslie (a, ) has recently offered a novel and innovative theory of generics which is already receiving much attention.  Theorists are compelled by Leslie's treatment of so-called troublesome generics, like:() Mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus.() Books are paperbacks.() Birds lay eggs.() is intuitively true despite the fact that only very few mosquitoes (less than %) carry the West Nile virus, while () is false even though the vast majority of books have paper covers. Still further, () is true despite the fact that it is only non-sterile female birds of reproductive age that lay eggs.These kinds of cases make it hard to specify truth-conditions for generics in terms of some stable quantificational criteria: On the one hand, if we take seriously the number of mosquitoes required to make () come out as true, then it seems like () is existentially quantified. (), on the other hand, appears to be universally quantified: It seems like we need a quantity even greater than a majority to guarantee its falsity. At the same time, () doesn't pattern with either () or (): () seems akin to a most-claim. These generics, then, give the appearance that it is very difficult to specify truth-conditions for generics in terms of some stable quantificational criteria.According to Leslie, this is evidence that the generalisations expressed by generics are more cognitively primitive than those expressed by quantified sentences. The "quirky" * Acknowledgments: This paper has benefited from discussions with

In response to Habgood-Coote (2019. "Stop Talking about Fake News!" Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9-10): 1033-1065.) and a growing number of scholars who argue that academics and journalists should stop talking about fake news and abandon the term, we argue that the reasons which have been offered for eschewing the term 'fake news' are not sufficient to justify such abandonment. Prima facie, then, we take ourselves and others to be justified in continuing to talk about fake news.

The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings.

The standard view amongst philosophers of language and linguists is that the logical form of generics is quantificational and contains a covert, unpronounced quantifier expression Gen. Recently, some theorists have begun to question the standard view and rekindle the competing proposal, that generics are a species of kind‐predication. These theorists offer some forceful objections to the standard view, and new strategies for dealing with the abundance of linguistic evidence in favour of the standard view. I respond to these objections and show that their strategies fail. I offer a novel argument in favour of the standard view that I call the binder argument. The upshot of this argument is that if one rejects the existence of Gen, then one is committed to rejecting the existence of covert structure in general (including domain variables and implicit argument places).

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