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  1. “Hillary Clinton is the Only Man in the Obama Administration”: Dual Character Concepts, Generics, and Gender.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2015 - Analytic Philosophy 56 (2):111-141.
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  • Generics and the ways of normality.Bernhard Nickel - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (6):629-648.
    I contrast two approaches to the interpretation of generics such as ‘ravens are black:’ majority-based views, on which they are about what is the case most of the time, and inquiry-based views, on which they are about a feature we focus on in inquiry. I argue that majority-based views face far more systematic counterexamples than has previously been supposed. They cannot account for generics about kinds with multiple characteristic properties, such as ‘elephants live in Africa and Asia.’ I then go (...)
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  • Reconceptualising the Psychological Theory of Generics.Tom Ralston - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (11):2973-2995.
    Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing a theory of the meaning of (...)
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  • Graded Genericity.Junhyo Lee & Anthony Nguyen - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
    Any adequate semantics of generic sentences (e.g., “Philosophers evaluate arguments”) must accommodate both what we call the positive data and the negative data. The positive data consists of observations about what felicitous interpretations of generic sentences are available. Conversely, the negative data consists of observations about which interpretations of generic sentences are unavailable. Nguyen argues that only his pragmatic neo-Gricean account and Sterken’s indexical account can accommodate the positive data. Lee and Nguyen have advanced the debate by arguing that the (...)
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  • Generic Excluded Middle.James Ravi Kirkpatrick - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint.
    There is a standard quantificational view of generic sentences according to which they have a tripartite logical form involving a phonologically null generic operator called 'Gen'. Recently, a number of theorists have questioned the standard view and revived a competing proposal according to which generics involve the predication of properties to kinds. This paper offers a novel argument against the kind-predication approach on the basis of the invalidity of Generic Excluded Middle, a principle according to which any sentence of the (...)
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  • Generics in Use.Annie Bosse - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Cambridge
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  • The Natural Probability Theory of Stereotypes.Jacob Stegenga - 2023 - Diametros:1-27.
    A stereotype is a belief or claim that a group of people has a particular feature. Stereotypes are expressed by sentences that have the form of generic statements, like “Canadians are nice.” Recent work on generics lends new life to understanding generics as statements involving probabilities. I argue that generics (and thus sentences expressing stereotypes) can take one of several forms involving conditional probabilities, and these probabilities have what I call a naturalness requirement. This is the natural probability theory of (...)
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  • Probability propagation rules for Aristotelian syllogisms.Niki Pfeifer & Giuseppe Sanfilippo - 2024 - Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 175 (9):103340.
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  • Non-conventionalized Generics and Exceptions.YoungEun Yoon - 2023 - Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 23:358-375.
    As is well known, research on generics is represented by three approaches: majority- based (Cohen 1996, 1999, 2004), normalcy-based (Nickel 2006; 2009; 2010a, b; 2013; 2016; 2018), and cognition-based (Leslie 2007a, b; 2008; 2013; 2017) approaches. Two recent approaches proposed by van Rooij and Schulz (2020) and Tessler and Goodman (2019) are more elaborated theories on generics, although neither of these approaches nor the three representative theories can fully account for various generics data, as argued by Yoon (2021). On the (...)
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  • Genericity.Ariel Cohen - 2022 - In Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. pp. 1-35.
    Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of individuals satisfy a certain (...)
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  • Generics: some (non) specifics.Anne Bosse - 2021 - Synthese (5-6):14383-14401.
    This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.
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  • Probability Semantics for Aristotelian Syllogisms.Niki Pfeifer & Giuseppe Sanfilippo - manuscript
    We present a coherence-based probability semantics for (categorical) Aristotelian syllogisms. For framing the Aristotelian syllogisms as probabilistic inferences, we interpret basic syllogistic sentence types A, E, I, O by suitable precise and imprecise conditional probability assessments. Then, we define validity of probabilistic inferences and probabilistic notions of the existential import which is required, for the validity of the syllogisms. Based on a generalization of de Finetti's fundamental theorem to conditional probability, we investigate the coherent probability propagation rules of argument forms (...)
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  • What’s Positive and Negative about Generics: A Constrained Indexical Approach.Junhyo Lee & Anthony Nguyen - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1739-1761.
    Nguyen argues that only his radically pragmatic account and Sterken’s indexical account can capture what we call the positive data. We present some new data, which we call the negative data, and argue that no theory of generics on the market is compatible with both the positive data and the negative data. We develop a novel version of the indexical account and show that it captures both the positive data and the negative data. In particular, we argue that there is (...)
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  • A Little Puzzle about a Piece and a Puddle.Mahrad Almotahari - 2020 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 12. Oxford University Press. pp. 231-261.
    A new puzzle about material constitution is presented and its implications are discussed. The moral of the story is that familiar intuitions supporting a neo-Aristotelian view of the material world are contradictory. To accommodate these intuitions is to embrace inconsistency. Therefore, neo-Aristotelianism is worse off for its intuitive appeal. Furthermore, the puzzle is used to argue for an account of ordinary modal thought and language that’s reconstructive, or ameliorative.
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  • (1 other version)#BelieveWomen and the Ethics of Belief.Renee Bolinger - forthcoming - In NOMOS LXIV: Truth and Evidence. New York:
    ​I evaluate a suggestion, floated by Kimberly Ferzan (this volume), that the twitter hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen is best accommodated by non-reductionist views of testimonial justification. I argue that the issue is ultimately one about the ethical obligation to trust women, rather than a question of what grounds testimonial justification. I also suggest that the hashtag campaign does not simply assert that ‘we should trust women’, but also militates against a pernicious striking-property generic (roughly: ‘women make false sexual assault accusations’), that (...)
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  • Falsifying generic stereotypes.Olivier Lemeire - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (7):2293-2312.
    Generic stereotypes are generically formulated generalizations that express a stereotype, like “Mexican immigrants are rapists” and “Muslims are terrorists.” Stereotypes like these are offensive and should not be asserted by anyone. Yet when someone does assert a sentence like this in a conversation, it is surprisingly difficult to successfully rebut it. The meaning of generic sentences is such that they can be true in several different ways. As a result, a speaker who is challenged after asserting a generic stereotype can (...)
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  • The Explanatory Link Account of Normality.Andrew Lavin - 2019 - Philosophy 94 (4):597-619.
    Few have given an extended treatment of the non-statistical sense of normality: a sense captured in sentences like “dogs have four legs,” or “hammers normally have metal heads,” or “it is normal for badgers to take dust baths.” The most direct extant treatment is Bernhard Nickel’s Between Logic and the World, where he claims that the normal or characteristic for a kind is what we can explain by appeal to the right sorts of explanations. Just which explanatory strategies can ground (...)
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  • Stable Causal Relationships Are Better Causal Relationships.Nadya Vasilyeva, Thomas Blanchard & Tania Lombrozo - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (4):1265-1296.
    We report three experiments investigating whether people’s judgments about causal relationships are sensitive to the robustness or stability of such relationships across a range of background circumstances. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that people are more willing to endorse causal and explanatory claims based on stable (as opposed to unstable) relationships, even when the overall causal strength of the relationship is held constant. In Experiment 2, we show that this effect is not driven by a causal generalization’s actual scope of (...)
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  • Generic Generalizations.Sarah-Jane Leslie & Adam Lerner - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Conditionals, Counterfactuals, and Rational Reasoning: An Experimental Study on Basic Principles.Leena Tulkki & Niki Pfeifer - 2017 - Minds and Machines 27 (1):119-165.
    We present a unified approach for investigating rational reasoning about basic argument forms involving indicative conditionals, counterfactuals, and basic quantified statements within coherence-based probability logic. After introducing the rationality framework, we present an interactive view on the relation between normative and empirical work. Then, we report a new experiment which shows that people interpret indicative conditionals and counterfactuals by coherent conditional probability assertions and negate conditionals by negating their consequents. The data support the conditional probability interpretation of conditionals and the (...)
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  • For-adverbials, Frequentative Aspect, and Pluractionality.Veerle van Geenhoven - 2004 - Natural Language Semantics 12 (2):135-190.
    In this paper, I develop a novel interval-based approach to some well-known semantic puzzles related to aspect shift, in particular, to the interaction of for-adverbials with accomplishment and achievement verbs that take indefinite, bare plural, and mass noun complements. My approach is based on the insight that implicit frequentative aspect plays a central role in this interaction, a fact that was largely ignored in previous analyses. Specifically, I interpret frequentative aspect as an abstract verb-level pluractional operator that brings about aspect (...)
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  • Generics and mental representations.Ariel Cohen - 2004 - Linguistics and Philosophy 27 (5):529-556.
    It is widely agreed that generics tolerate exceptions. It turns out, however, that exceptions are tolerated only so long as they do not violate homogeneity: when the exceptions are not concentrated in a salient “chunk” of the domain of the generic. The criterion for salience of a chunk is cognitive: it is dependent on the way in which the domain is mentally represented. Findings of psychological experiments about the ways in which different domains are represented, and the actors affecting such (...)
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  • Commemoration and constriction.Chong-Ming Lim - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics:1-20.
    In analysing the problems with commemorative artefacts, philosophers have tended to focus on objectionable monuments that honour inappropriate subjects. The problems with such monuments, however, do not exhaust problems with a society’s public commemorative landscape – the totality of public commemorative artefacts in general, and the institutions involved in their creation and maintenance. I argue that a public commemorative landscape can implicate authoritative ideas, including stereotypes about people in virtue of their group membership. This contributes to what I term hermeneutical (...)
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  • Prejudice, generics, and resistance to evidence.M. Giulia Napolitano - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (8):2571-2584.
    In his book, "Prejudice", Endre Begby offers a novel and engaging account of the epistemology of prejudice which challenges some of the standard assumptions that have so far guided the recent discussion on the topic. One of Begby's central arguments against the standard view of prejudice, according to which a prejudiced person necessarily displays an epistemically culpable resistance to counterevidence, is that, qua stereotype judgments, prejudices can be flexible and rationally maintained upon encountering many disconfirming instances. By expanding on Begby's (...)
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  • Generic conjunctivitis.James Ravi Kirkpatrick - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 46 (2):379-428.
    Generic sentences involving phrasal conjunctions present a prima facie problem for the standard theory of generics according to which they express quasi-universal generalisations about what is characteristic for members of a particular kind. For example, the sentence ‘Elephants live in Africa and Asia’ is true, even though it is uncharacteristic for an elephant to live in both Africa and Asia. In response to this problem, theorists have recently proposed radical departures from the standard view. This paper argues that such departures (...)
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  • A new look at the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ effect.Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Linnaea Stockall & Napoleon Katsos - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (9):1655–1681.
    While generic generalisations have been studied by linguists and philosophers for decades, they have only recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and developmental psychologists, who propose the generics-as-default view. In this paper we focus on the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ (GOG) effect proposed by Leslie and colleagues and the native speaker judgments that have been used to support it, and by extension, the generics-as-default view. We take a step back to look at the history of the GOG effect in (...)
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  • Generic Animalism.Andrew M. Bailey & Peter van Elswyk - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (8):405-429.
    The animalist says we are animals. This thesis is commonly understood as the universal generalization that all human persons are human animals. This article proposes an alternative: the thesis is a generic that admits of exceptions. We defend the resulting view, which we call ‘generic animalism’, and show its aptitude for diagnosing the limits of eight case-based objections to animalism.
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  • (2 other versions)Generics.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2011 - In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 355--366.
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  • An intensional parametric semantics for vague quantifiers.Shalom Lappin - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (6):599-620.
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  • Normative generics and social kind terms.Samia Hesni - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):3216-3239.
    Generic statements are commonly expressed using the bare plural – ‘tigers are striped’ – or the indefinite singular – ‘a tiger is striped’. Notoriously, some generics can be expressed using the bare plural locution, but not the indefinite singular; bare plural generics and indefinite singular generics pattern differently. I explore this phenomenon as it applies to normative generic statements: expressions like boys don’t cry, women are kind and nurturing, children are seen and not heard – that convey something over and (...)
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  • Exceptions to generics: Where vagueness, context dependence and modality interact.Yael Greenberg - 2007 - Journal of Semantics 24 (2):131-167.
    This paper deals with the exceptions-tolerance property of generic sentences with indefinite singular and bare plural subjects (IS and BP generics, respectively) and with the way this property is connected to some well-known observations about felicity differences between the two types of generics (e.g. Lawler's 1973, Madrigals are popular vs. #A madrigal is popular). I show that whereas both IS and BP generics tolerate exceptional and contextually irrelevant individuals and situations in a strikingly similar way, which indicates the existence of (...)
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  • A new look at the problem of rule-following: a generic perspective.Kai-Yuan Cheng - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 155 (1):1 - 21.
    The purpose of this paper is to look at the problem of rule-following—notably discussed by Kripke (Wittgenstein on rules and private language, 1982) and Wittgenstein (Philosophical investigations, 1953)—from the perspective of the study of generics. Generics are sentences that express generalizations that tolerate exceptions. I first suggest that meaning ascriptions be viewed as habitual sentences, which are a sub-set of generics. I then seek a proper semantic analysis for habitually construed meaning sentences. The quantificational approach is rejected, due to its (...)
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  • Existential generics.Ariel Cohen - 2004 - Linguistics and Philosophy 27 (2):137-168.
    While opinions on the semantic analysis of generics vary widely, most scholars agree that generics have a quasi-universal flavor. However, there are cases where generics receive what appears to be an existentialinterpretation. For example, B's response is true, even though only theplatypus and the echidna lay eggs: (1) A: Birds lay eggs. B: Mammals lay eggs too. In this paper I propose a uniform account of the semantics of generics,which accounts for their quasi-existential readings as well as for their more (...)
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  • The acquisition of generics.James Ravi Kirkpatrick - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (4):492-517.
    It has been argued that the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for standard quantificational approaches to generics and instead motivates the claim that generics give voice to an innate, default mode of generalising. This article argues that analogous puzzles involving the acquisition of A‐quantifiers undermine the empirical support for a purely cognition‐based approach to generics. Instead, these acquisition puzzles should be solved by generalising the core insight of the cognitive defaults theory to these expressions, (...)
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  • Genericity is Easy? Formal and Experimental Perspectives.Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Napoleon Katsos & Linnaea Stockall - 2015 - Ratio 28 (4):470-494.
    In this paper, we compare the formal semantics approach to genericity, within which genericity is viewed as a species of quantification, and a growing body of experimental and developmental work on the topic, mainly by psychologists rather than linguists, proposing that genericity is categorically different from quantification. We argue that this generics-as-default hypothesis is much less well supported by evidence than its supporters contend, and that a research program combining theoretical and experimental research methods and considerations in the same studies (...)
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  • Dispositions and generics.Ryan Wasserman - 2011 - Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1):425-453.
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  • Number marking and (in)definiteness in kind terms.Veneeta Dayal - 2004 - Linguistics and Philosophy 27 (4):393-450.
    This paper explores the link between number marking and(in)definiteness in nominals and their interpretation. Differencesbetween bare singulars and plurals in languages without determinersare explained by treating bare nominals as kind terms. Differencesarise, it is argued, because singular and plural kinds relatedifferently to their instantiations. In languages with determiners,singular kinds typically occur with the definite determiner, butplural/mass kinds can be bare in some languages and definite inothers. An account of singular kinds in terms of taxonomic readingsis proposed, with number marking playing (...)
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  • Unifying the imperfective and the progressive: Partitions as quantificational domains. [REVIEW]Ashwini Deo - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (5):475-521.
    This paper offers a new unified theory about the meaning of the imperfective and progressive aspects that builds on earlier of analyses in the literature that treat the imperfective as denoting a universal quantifier (e.g. Bonomi, Linguist Philos, 20(5):469–514, 1997; Cipria and Roberts, Nat Lang Semant 8(4):297–347, 2000). It is shown that the problems associated with such an analysis can be overcome if the domain of the universal quantifier is taken to be a partition of a future extending interval into (...)
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  • Relative Readings of Many, Often, and Generics.Ariel Cohen - 2001 - Natural Language Semantics 9 (1):41-67.
    In addition to the familiar cardinal and proportional readings of many and few, there is yet another interpretation, the relative proportional reading. This reading, unlike the ordinary absolute proportional reading, is not conservative. Under the relative reading, 'Many ψs are φs' is true just in case the proportion of φs among ψs is greater than the proportion of φs among members of contextually given alternatives to ψ. I provide a definition of proportional readings that reduces the differences between absolute and (...)
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  • Assessing the modality particles of the yi group in fuzzy possible-worlds semantics.Matthias Gerner - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (2):143-184.
    Of late, evidentiality has received great attention in formal semantics. In this paper I develop ‘evidentiality-informed’ truth conditions for modal operators such as must and may . With language data drawn from Luoping Nase (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the P.R. of China and belonging to the Yi Nationality), I illustrate that epistemic modals clash with clauses articulating first-hand information. I then demonstrate that existing models such as Kratzer’s graded possible-worlds semantics fail to provide accurate truth conditions for modals tagging (...)
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  • Topic, Focus, and the Interpretation of Bare Plurals.Ariel Cohen & Nomi Erteschik-Shir - 2002 - Natural Language Semantics 10 (2):125-165.
    In this paper we show that focus structure determines the interpretation of bare plurals in English: topic bare plurals are interpreted generically, focused bare plurals are interpreted existentially. When bare plurals are topics they must be specific, i.e. they refer to kinds. After type-shifting they introduce variables which can be bound by the generic quantifier, yielding characterizing generics. Existentially interpreted bare plurals are not variables, but denote properties that are incorporated into the predicate.The type of predicate determines the interpretation of (...)
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  • Generically free choice.Bernhard Nickel - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (6):479-512.
    This paper discusses free-choice like effects in generics. Just as Jane may drink coffee or tea can be used to convey Jane may drink coffee and Jane may drink tea (she is free to choose ), some generics with disjunctive predicates can be used to convey conjunctions of simpler generics: elephants live in Africa or Asia can be used to convey elephants live in Africa and elephants live in Asia. Investigating these logically slightly more complex generics and especially the free-choice (...)
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  • Nested conditionals and genericity in the de Finetti semantics.Daniel Lassiter & Jean Baratgin - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (1):42-52.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 10, Issue 1, Page 42-52, March 2021.
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