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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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. |
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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 (...) |
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In his _Between Logic and the World_, in the course of presenting his theory of generics, Nickel (Between logic and the world, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a theory of characteristicness, or “genericity”, which states that a property is characteristic for a kind if and only if its presence among the members of that kind is explicable by some explanatory domain that recognizes the existence of that kind in the course of engaging the explanatory strategies made available by that (...) |
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The present paper focuses on the phenomenon of normativity and genericity in language and cognition. More specifically, it investigates the use of normative generics, which are generalizations that state an ideal norm for a given category, in the context of norm breaching in parent-child interactions in English. This issue is researched by means of a specially designed questionnaire including 8 norm breaching parent-child interactions, which has been completed online by ca. 70 English-speaking female respondents. The paper uses qualitative and quantitative (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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This article discusses four ways of understanding the concept of humor: 1) in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, as 2) a cluster concept, 3) an interpretive concept, and 4) a dual character concept. We peruse both historical and contemporary research on humor, but instead of asking “What is humor?,” we draw conclusions regarding what humor research tells us of the ways to conceptualize humor. The main merits and shortcomings of different approaches are explicated. We suggest that the increased awareness (...) |
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Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 10, Issue 3, Page 218-225, September 2021. |
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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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Generic claims like ‘women stay home and raise children’ and ‘boys don’t cry’ are normative generics: generic claims that express a norm. The truth conditions of normative generics are even harder to account for than those for more descriptive generics like ‘ducks lay eggs.’ Until recently, such generics were treated as deviant and thus not accounted for in standard accounts of generics. But recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of normative generics has changed that. In light of this recent (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes”) leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to (...) |
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The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4–5 and adults) explore patterns of age‐related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., “scientist”). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category‐normative traits, and the two were dissociable, indicating that even young children's conceptual representations for some social categories have a “dual character.” In Study 2, when labels and traits were contrasted, adults and children based their category‐based induction (...) |
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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, (...) |
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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, (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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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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 (...) |
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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’. |
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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 (...) |
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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 paper maintains that the two claims are compatible. It develops and defends an overlooked form of contextualism grounded in the idiosyncrasies of System 1 thought. |
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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. (...) |
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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 (...) |
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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 (...) |
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