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It is often possible to know what a speaker intends to communicate without knowing what they intend to express. In such cases, speakers need not intend to express anything at all. Stanley and Szabó's influential survey of possible analysis of quantifier domain restriction is, therefore, incomplete and the arguments made by Clapp and Buchanan against Truth Conditional Compositionality and propositional speaker‐meaning are flawed. Two theories should not always be viewed as incompatible when they associate the same utterance with different propositions, as there may be many ways to interpret speakers that are compatible with their intentions.

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Generic generalisations like 'Opioids are highly addictive' are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not endorse. Rather than excising generic generalisations from scientific communication, I recommend that scientific communicators carefully consider the kinds of questions their words might be taken to answer and try to avoid phrasing that might be taken to provide unintended answers. Generic GeneralisationsChildren are not infectious (Daniel Koch, Swiss Federal Office for Public Health Delegate for COVID-19, 27 April 2020.) 1 Koch uttered this sentence during a Swiss COVID-19 press conference, where he was explaining the decision to allow grandparents to hug their grandchildren. The utterance is what is known as a generic generalisation (or simply a generic). Generics can be expressed as bare plurals ('Intensive care patients are vulnerable to infections'), indefinites ('A broken leg is treated with a cast'), definites ('The bacteria salmonella is transmitted through ingestion of contaminated food'), and habituals ('SARS-CoV-2 causes Covid-19'). 2 As I use the term, generics are characterised by two key properties: generics are generalisations that do not answer questions like 'How many/much?' or 'How often?' Generics are generalisations. They tell us about regularities. 3 The generic 'Intensive care patients are vulnerable to infections', for example, might be accepted based on experience of a particular group of patients but tells us about intensive care patients in general, not only about those specific instances. In contrast, nongeneric bare plurals are not generalisations and talk only about a particular thing or collection of things. From 'Birds chased me down the street', you know that some particular collection of birds chased me down the street, but you cannot generalise the property of having chased me down the street to birds in general. Likewise for nongeneric indefinites ('A patient is waiting in Room 302') and definites ('The doctor will see you now').Generics do not answer questions like 'How many?' or 'How often?' 4 For example, the question, 'How often is the bacteria salmonella transmitted through ingestion of contaminated food?' cannot be answered with the generic 'The bacteria salmonella is