Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Addiction and the self.Hanna Pickard - 2021 - Noûs 55 (4):737-761.
    Addiction is standardly characterized as a neurobiological disease of compulsion. Against this characterization, I argue that many cases of addiction cannot be explained without recognizing the value of drugs to those who are addicted; and I explore in detail an insufficiently recognized source of value, namely, a sense of self and social identity as an addict. For people who lack a genuine alternative sense of self and social identity, recovery represents an existential threat. Given that an addict identification carries expectations (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • What is a colleague? The descriptive and normative dimension of a dual character concept.Kevin Reuter, Jörg Löschke & Monika Betzler - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (7):997-1017.
    Colleagues are not only an integral part of many people’s lives; empirical research suggests that having a good relationship with one’s colleagues is the single most important factor for being happy at work. However, so far, no one has provided a comprehensive account of what it means to be a colleague. To address this lacuna, we have conducted both an empirical as well as theoretical investigation into the content and structure of the concept ‘colleague.’ Based on the empirical evidence that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Structural thinking about social categories: Evidence from formal explanations, generics, and generalization.Nadya Vasilyeva & Tania Lombrozo - 2020 - Cognition 204 (C):104383.
    Many theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors that underlie kind membership and explain properties of category members. Across three studies (N = 281), we document the characteristics of an alternative form of construal according to which the properties of social kinds are seen as products of structural factors: stable, external constraints that obtain due to the kind’s social position. Internalist and structural construals are similar in that both support formal explanations (i.e., “category member has property (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Generics and Epistemic Injustice.Martina Rosola & Federico Cella - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (5):739-754.
    In this paper, we argue that, although neglected so far, there is a strong link between generics and testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word”. Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a category or about its members without specifying what proportion of the category members possess the predicated property. We argue that generics are especially suited to cause testimonial (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • The Language of Mental Illness.Renee Bolinger - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge.
    This paper surveys some philosophical issues with the language surrounding mental illness, but is especially focused on pejoratives relating to mental illness. I argue that though 'crazy' and similar mental illness-based epithets (MI-epithets) are not best understood as slurs, they do function to isolate, exclude, and marginalize members of the targeted group in ways similar to the harmfulness of slurs more generally. While they do not generally express the hate/contempt characteristic of weaponized uses of slurs, MI-epithets perpetuate epistemic injustice by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Logic and Normative Force of Dual-Character Generics: Towards a Theoretical Model for the Study of Normatively Shifted Predications.Aleksandra Kowalewska-Buraczewska - 2020 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 61 (1):113-126.
    This paper investigates the relationship between generic statements and the expression, transmission and persistence of social norms. The author presents the concept of normativity and its importance in the decision-making process in the context of social reality and social norms that comprise it (Bicchieri, 2006, 2016; Bicchieri et al., 2018). The paper analyses the idea of “what is normal” (Haslanger, 2014) to show how social norms are triggered by particular generic constructions relating to “social kinds”, represented by noun phrases denoting (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Linguistic Interventions and Transformative Communicative Disruption.Rachel Katharine Sterken - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 417-434.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Dual Character Art Concepts.Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin & Joshua Knobe - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1):102-128.
    Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept ART. At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts. Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Moral Constraints on Gender Concepts.N. G. Laskowski - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (1):39-51.
    Are words like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ sex terms that we use to talk about biological features of individuals? Are they gender terms that we use to talk about non-biological features e.g. social roles? Contextualists answer both questions affirmatively, arguing that these terms concern biological or non-biological features depending on context. I argue that a recent version of contextualism from Jennifer Saul that Esa Diaz-Leon develops doesn't exhibit the right kind of flexibility to capture our theoretical intuitions or moral and political (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Gender and Gender Terms.Elizabeth Barnes - 2019 - Noûs 54 (3):704-730.
    Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   63 citations  
  • The Radical Account of Bare Plural Generics.Anthony Nguyen - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (5):1303-1331.
    Bare plural generic sentences pervade ordinary talk. And yet it is extremely controversial what semantics to assign to such sentences. In this paper, I achieve two tasks. First, I develop a novel classification of the various standard uses to which bare plurals may be put. This “variety data” is important—it gives rise to much of the difficulty in systematically theorizing about bare plurals. Second, I develop a novel account of bare plurals, the radical account. On this account, all bare plurals (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs.Eleonore Neufeld - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Dual character concepts.Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 14 (1):e12557.
    Some of philosophy's most central concepts, including art, friendship, and happiness, have been argued to be dual character concepts. Their main characteristic is that they encode not only a descriptive dimension but also an independent normative dimension for categorization. This article introduces the class of dual character concepts and discusses various accounts of their content and structure. A specific focus will be placed on their relation to two other classes of concepts, thick concepts and natural kind concepts. The study of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • A Bayesian explanation of the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs involving generic content.Paul Silva - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2465-2487.
    Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of such sexist and racist beliefs upon learning of many counter-instances, i.e. members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. Accordingly, epistemic allies think that those who give up their sexist or racist beliefs in such circumstances are rationally responding to their evidence, while those who do not (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Mere formalities: fictional normativity and normative authority.Daniel Wodak - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (6):1-23.
    It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • The Mark of the Plural: Generic Generalizations and Race.Daniel Wodak & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2017 - In Paul Taylor, Linda Martin Alcoff & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race. Routledge. pp. 277-289.
    We argue that generic generalizations about racial groups are pernicious in what they communicate (both to members of that racial group and to members of other racial groups), and may be central to the construction of social categories like racial groups. We then consider how we should change and challenge uses of generic generalizations about racial groups.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Meaning, modulation, and context: a multidimensional semantics for truth-conditional pragmatics.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (2):165-207.
    The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Dual Character Concepts in Social Cognition: Commitments and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual Representation.Guillermo Del Pinal & Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S3):477–501.
    The concepts expressed by social role terms such as artist and scientist are unique in that they seem to allow two independent criteria for categorization, one of which is inherently normative. This study presents and tests an account of the content and structure of the normative dimension of these “dual character concepts.” Experiment 1 suggests that the normative dimension of a social role concept represents the commitment to fulfill the idealized basic function associated with the role. Background information can affect (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  • True happiness: The role of morality in the folk concept of happiness.Jonathan Phillips, Christian Mott, Julian De Freitas, June Gruber & Joshua Knobe - 2017 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 146 (2):165-181.
    Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstrates that moral judgments influence assessments of happiness not only (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  • Prototypes as compositional components of concepts.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2016 - Synthese 193 (9):2899–2927.
    The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as fish, red, and gun. Hypotheses and are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that is not negotiable; so (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • What a Loaded Generalization: Generics and Social Cognition.Daniel Wodak, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Marjorie Rhodes - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (9):625-635.
    This paper explores the role of generics in social cognition. First, we explore the nature and effects of the most common form of generics about social kinds. Second, we discuss the nature and effects of a less common but equally important form of generics about social kinds. Finally, we consider the implications of this discussion for how we ought to use language about the social world.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • Dual Content Semantics, privative adjectives and dynamic compositionality.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2015 - Semantics and Pragmatics 8 (7):1-53.
    This paper defends the view that common nouns have a dual semantic structure that includes extension-determining and non-extension-determining components. I argue that the non-extension-determining components are part of linguistic meaning because they play a key compositional role in certain constructions, especially in privative noun phrases such as "fake gun" and "counterfeit document". Furthermore, I show that if we modify the compositional interpretation rules in certain simple ways, this dual content account of noun phrase modification can be implemented in a type-driven (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Feminist philosophy of language.Jennifer Saul - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Much of feminist philosophy of language so far can be described as critical—critical either of language itself or of philosophy of language, and calling for change on the basis of these criticisms. Those making these criticisms suggest that the changes are needed for the sake of feminist goals — either to better allow for feminist work to be done or, more frequently, to bring an end to certain key ways that women are disadvantaged. In this entry, I examine these criticisms. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • ‘You do it like this!’: Bare Impersonals as Indefinite Singular Generics.James Ravi Kirkpatrick & Joshua Knobe - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Sentences with impersonal pronouns, like 'You do it like this', seem to make both statistical and prescriptive claims, that a certain way of behaving is common and that it is prescriptively good. We argue that these kinds of sentences are closely related to another kind of sentence, namely, indefinite singular generics, like 'A person does it like this'. We propose that there is a single underlying mechanism that allows both kinds of sentences to express mixed statistical/prescriptive readings. We then provide (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Explaining social kinds: the role of covert normativity.Rachel Katherine Cooper - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (11):2955-2972.
    The goal of the debunking social constructionist is to reveal as social kinds that are widely held to be natural (or, in some cases, to reveal as more deeply social kinds that are already widely recognized to be social). The prominent approach to such debunking has been to make a case for thinking that the individuation conditions for membership in the kinds in question are in fact social (or in fact more deeply social than has previously been recognized). In this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Playing with labels: Identity terms as tools for building agency.Elisabeth Camp & Carolina Flores - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (4):1103-1136.
    Identity labels like “woman”, “Black,” “mother,” and “evangelical” are pervasive in both political and personal life, and in both formal and informal classification and communication. They are also widely thought to undermine agency by essentializing groups, flattening individual distinctiveness, and enforcing discrimination. While we take these worries to be well-founded, we argue that they result from a particular practice of using labels to rigidly label others. We identify an alternative practice of playful self-labelling, and argue that it can function as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • True Beauty.Ryan P. Doran - forthcoming - British Journal of Aesthetics.
    What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • El blanco y la extensión de los epítetos.Axel Arturo Barceló - manuscript
    Este breve ensayo se inscribe en la tradición de buscar similitudes entre los epítetos y otros fenómenos lingüísticos, tanto inofensivos como discriminatorios. En particular, trataré de motivar la introducción de una distinción entre el blanco de un epíteto y su extensión y mostraré cómo esta distinción nos sirve para ver similitudes entre el comportamiento de este tipo de expresiones y el del complemento “de verdad” en expresiones como “tacos de verdad”. De paso, trataré también de explorar si estas teorías, desarrolladas (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Generics in Use.Annie Bosse - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Cambridge
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Experimental Legal Philosophy: General Jurisprudence.Raff Donelson - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 309-326.
    This chapter offers an overview of experimental legal philosophy with a special focus on questions in general jurisprudence, that part of legal philosophy that asks about the concept and nature of law. Much of the experimental general jurisprudence work has tended to follow the questions that have interested general jurisprudence scholars for decades, that is, questions about the relation between legal norms and moral norms. Wholesale criticism of experimental general jurisprudence is scant, but, given existing debates about experimental philosophy generally, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Are there really any dual‐character concepts?David Plunkett & Jonathan Phillips - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):340-369.
    There has been growing excitement in recent years about “dual‐character” concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual‐character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use either the descriptive features or the abstract value for determining the extension of the concept. Here, we skeptically investigate the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Generic cognition: A neglected source of context sensitivity.Mahrad Almotahari - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (4):472-491.
    What is the relationship between the claim that generics articulate psychologically primitive generalizations and the claim that they exhibit a unique form of context sensitivity? This article maintains that the two claims are compatible. It develops and defends an overlooked form of contextualism grounded in the idiosyncrasies of system 1 thought.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • One strike and you’re a lout: Cherished values increase the stringency of moral character attributions.Joshua Rottman, Emily Foster-Hanson & Sam Bellersen - 2023 - Cognition 239 (C):105570.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • “Philosophers care about the truth”: Descriptive/normative generics.Olivier Lemeire - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):772-786.
    Some generic generalizations have both a descriptive and a normative reading. The generic sentence “Philosophers care about the truth”, for instance, can be read as describing what philosophers in fact care about, but can also be read as prescribing philosophers to care about the truth. On Leslie’s account, this generic sentence has two readings due to the polysemy of the kind term “philosopher”. In this paper, I first argue against this polysemy account of descriptive/normative generics. In response, a contextualist semantic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Stereotyping and Generics.Anne Bosse - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-17.
    We use generic sentences like ‘Blondes are stupid’ to express stereotypes. But why is this? Does the fact that we use generic sentences to express stereotypes mean that stereotypes are themselves, in some sense, generic? I argue that they are. However, stereotypes are mental and generics linguistic, so how can stereotypes be generic? My answer is that stereotypes are generic in virtue of the beliefs they contain. Stereotypes about blondes being stupid contain a belief element, namely a belief that blondes (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Essentializing Inferences.Katherine Ritchie - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (4):570-591.
    Predicate nominals (e.g., “is a female”) seem to label or categorize their subjects, while their adjectival correlates (e.g., “is female”) merely attribute a property. Predicate nominals also elicit essentializing inferential judgments about inductive potential and stable explanatory membership. Data from psychology and semantics support that this distinction is robust and productive. I argue that while the difference between predicate nominals and predicate adjectives is elided by standard semantic theories, it ought not be. I then develop and defend a psychologically motivated (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • “They're Not True Humans:” Beliefs about Moral Character Drive Denials of Humanity.Ben Phillips - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (2):e13089.
    A puzzling feature of paradigmatic cases of dehumanization is that the perpetrators often attribute uniquely human traits to their victims. This has become known as the “paradox of dehumanization.” We address the paradox by arguing that the perpetrators think of their victims as human in one sense, while denying that they are human in another sense. We do so by providing evidence that people harbor a dual character concept of humanity. Research has found that dual character concepts have two independent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • 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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy.Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) - 2023 - Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Normative generics: Against semantic polysemy.Samia Hesni - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (3):218-225.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 10, Issue 3, Page 218-225, September 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Gender Categories as Dual‐Character Concepts?Cai Guo, Carol S. Dweck & Ellen M. Markman - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (5):e12954.
    Seminal work by Knobe, Prasada, and Newman (2013) distinguished a set of concepts, which they named “dual‐character concepts.” Unlike traditional concepts, they require two distinct criteria for determining category membership. For example, the prototypical dual‐character concept “artist” has both a concrete dimension of artistic skills, and an abstract dimension of aesthetic sensibility and values. Therefore, someone can be a good artist on the concrete dimension but not truly an artist on the abstract dimension. Does this analysis capture people's understanding of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory.Erin Beeghly - 2021 - Social Epistemology 35 (6):547-563.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • A rich-lexicon theory of slurs and their uses.Dan Zeman - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):942-966.
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I present data involving the use of the Romanian slur ‘țigan’, consideration of which leads to the postulation of a sui-generis, irreducible type of use of slurs. This type of use is potentially problematic for extant theories of slurs. In addition, together with other well-established uses, it shows that there is more variation in the use of slurs than previously acknowledged. I explain this variation by construing slurs as polysemous. To implement this idea, I appeal to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Generic Generalizations.Sarah-Jane Leslie & Adam Lerner - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • Stereotypes, Conceptual Centrality and Gender Bias: An Empirical Investigation.Guillermo Del Pinal, Alex Madva & Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2017 - Ratio 30 (4):384-410.
    Discussions in social psychology overlook an important way in which biases can be encoded in conceptual representations. Most accounts of implicit bias focus on ‘mere associations’ between features and representations of social groups. While some have argued that some implicit biases must have a richer conceptual structure, they have said little about what this richer structure might be. To address this lacuna, we build on research in philosophy and cognitive science demonstrating that concepts represent dependency relations between features. These relations, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • The pragmatic view on dual character concepts and expressions.Lucien Baumgartner - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (5):726-744.
    This article introduces a new pragmatic framework for dual character concepts and their expressions, offering an alternative to the received lexical‐semantic view. On the prevalent lexical‐semantic view, expressions such as “philosopher” or “scientist” are construed as lexical polysemes, comprising both a descriptive and a normative dimension. Thereby, this view prioritizes established norms, neglecting normative expressions emerging in specific contexts. In contrast, the pragmatic view integrates pragmatic modulation as a central element in explaining context‐dependent dual character concepts and expressions. This not (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Triviality Worry About Gender Terms and Epistemic Injustice.Stina Björkholm - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.
    According to contextualism, a gender term such as ‘woman’ does not invariantly refer to a specific social or biological kind. Instead, gender terms have different extensions depending on the context of utterance. Contextualism accommodates that speakers are perfectly able to use gender terms in very different ways and still be coherent and successful in their communicative exchanges. However, while the flexibility of contextualism is its primary asset, it has also turned out to be its potential demise. The worry is that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Generics and social justice.Samia Hesni - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (1):109-132.
    Is it harmful to make generic claims about social groups? Those who say yes cite the reinforcement of oppressive stereotypes and cognitive bias. Those who say no cite the potential of generics to do good, rather than harm, by taking advantage of the same mechanisms that perpetuate the harms. This paper analyzes generic utterances in the context of social justice efforts to weigh in on the debate about whether and how generic utterances contribute to stereotypes and oppression. We need to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How language shapes our minds: On the relationship between generics, stereotypes and social norms.Leda Berio & Kristina Musholt - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (4):944-961.
    In this article, we discuss the role of labels and generics referring to social kinds in mindshaping practices, arguing that they promote generalizations that foster essentialist thinking and carry a normative force. We propose that their cognitive function consists in both contributing to the formation and reinforcement of schemata and scripts for social interaction and in activating these schemata in specific social situations. Moreover, we suggest that failure to meet the expectations engendered by these schemata and scripts leads to the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations