This article maintains that an important class of scientific generalizations should be reinterpreted: they have typically been understood as ceteris paribus laws, but are, in fact, generics. Four arguments are presented to support this thesis. One argument is that the interpretation in terms of ceteris paribus laws is a historical accident. The other three arguments draw on similarities between these generalizations and archetypal generics: they come with similar inferential commitments, they share a syntactic form, and the existing theories to make (...) sense of them are alike. Once these generalizations are properly understood as generics, the recent cognitive approach to generics can be extended to the study of the relevant sciences. The last section indicates ways in which this extension is fruitful for the two strands of research that we combine: the philosophy of science literature on generalizations and the semantics literature on generics. (shrink)

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 (...) persistent difficulties. Instead, a cognitive approach is adopted, where psychological considerations of meaning attributors play a crucial role. This account is then compared with the picture of meaning offered by Kripke and Wittgenstein, respectively. I show how this fresh way of conceiving of meaning sentences respects some of their insights while avoiding some of the drawbacks, and serves to improve the framework in which the current debate and inquiry about rule-following are conducted. (shrink)

We investigate experimentally whether the perceived offensiveness of slurs survives when they are reported, by comparing Italian slurs and insults in base utterances (Y is an S), direct speech (X said: “Y is an S”), mixed quotation (X said that Y is “an S”), and indirect speech (X said that Y is an S). For all strategies, reporting decreases the perceived offensiveness without removing it. For slurs, but not insults, indirect speech is perceived as more offensive than direct speech. Our (...) hypothesis is that, because slurs constitute hate speech, speakers employ quotation marks to signal their dissociation from slur use. (shrink)

Generics (e.g., “Ravens are black”) express generalizations about categories or their members. Previous research found that generics about animals are interpreted as broadly true of members of a kind, yet also accepted based on minimal evidence. This asymmetry is important for suggesting a mechanism by which unfounded generalizations may flourish; yet, little is known whether this finding extends to generics about groups of people (heretofore, “social generics”). Accordingly, in four preregistered studies (n = 665), we tested for an inferential asymmetry (...) for generics regarding novel groups of animals versus people. Participants were randomly assigned to either an Implied Prevalence task (given a generic, asked to estimate the prevalence of a property) or a Truth-Conditions task (given prevalence information, asked whether a generic was true or false). A generic asymmetry was found in both domains, at equivalent levels. The asymmetry also extended to properties varying in valence (dangerous and neutral). Finally, there were differences as a function of property valence in the Implied Prevalence task and a small but consistent interaction between domain and prevalence in the Truth-Conditions task. We discuss the implications of these results for the semantics of generics, theoretical accounts of the asymmetry, and the relation between generics and stereotyping. (shrink)

I argue that racially biased perception can be incompetent in a way that undermines perceptual warrant. This can occur even when the subject is unaware of the influence of the bias upon their beliefs or when they possess no defeating evidence that makes it rational for them to doubt the accuracy of their perceptual experiences. When a subject’s racial bias causes their perceptual system to encode inaccurate information about their environment, or to process information in an epistemically incompetent manner, this (...) can reduce their perceptual competence, and thus their perceptual warrant. I discuss a series of cases that illustrate how my proposals treat various instances of racially biased perception. I then distinguish my view from a competing proposal from Jessie Munton (2019) which claims that racially biased priors are epistemically incompetent because they are gerrymandered. A gerrymandered prior is one whose accuracy depends on ongoing manipulations of the environment. I argue that the kinds of manipulations that Munton cites do not necessarily impact perceptual competence and that my account better explains how racist institutions and societal structures can impact the epistemic competence of perceivers. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme The Ethics and Politics of Academic Knowledge Production. Questions of who produces knowledge about what, and how that knowledge is produced, are inherent to editing and publishing academic journals. At the Journal of Business (...) Ethics, we understand the ethical responsibility of academic knowledge production as going far beyond conventions around the integrity of the research content and research processes. We are deeply aware that access to resources, knowledge of the rules of the game, and being able to set those rules, are systematically and unequally distributed. One could ask the question “for whom is knowledge now ethical’”? (See the Burrell commentary.) We have a responsibility to address these inequalities and open up our journal to lesser heard voices, ideas, and ways of being. Our six commentators pursue this through various aspects of the ethics and politics of academic knowledge production. Working with MacIntyre’s scheme of practices and institutions, Andrew West provides commentary on the internal good of business ethics learning and education. Inviting us to step out of the cave, Christopher Michaelson urges a clear-eyed, unblinking focus on the purposes and audiences of business ethics scholarship. As developmental editor, Scott Taylor uncovers some of the politics of peer review with the aim of nurturing of unconventional research. Mike Hyman presents his idiosyncratic view of marketing ethics. In the penultimate commentary, Julie Nelson attributes difficulties in the academic positioning of the Business Ethics field to the hegemony of a masculine-centric model of the firm. And finally, Gibson Burrell provides a powerful provocation to go undercover as researcher-investigators in a parallel ethics of the research process. (shrink)

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.

A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, even if they did, they introduce (...) new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but even if they didn’t, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents’ negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication. (shrink)

In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell (2022) provide an ambitious and compelling history of the evolution of human morality. Informed by evidence from an impressively vast multidisciplinary literature, they offer a rich bio-cultural evolutionary explanation of how the human moral mind arose and developed over time that has wide appeal for philosophers and scientists alike. In this paper, I examine Kumar and Campbell’s novel moral psychology and raise questions about their account of the relationship between moral norms (...) and core moral emotions. I also argue that social essentialist cognition has a place alongside the moral emotions as a key ingredient in Kumar and Campbell’s view of the moral mind as well as in their normative account of how to work towards moral progress. (shrink)

One of David Estlund’s key claims in Utopophobia is that theories of justice should not bend to human motivational limitations. Yet he does not extend this view to our cognitive limitations. This creates a dilemma. Theories of justice may ignore cognitive as well as motivational limitations—but this makes them so unrealistic as to be unrecognizable as theories of justice. Theories may bend to both cognitive and motivational limitations—but Estlund wants to reject this view. The other alternative is to find some (...) non-ad hoc way to distinguish cognitive from motivational limitations. I argue that this strategy will not work. Just as a person’s cognitive limitations may block her motives no matter how much she perseveres, so too motivational limitations may be genuine inabilities. Even ideal theories of justice must bend to even ordinary motivational limitations when they truly cause us to be unable to comply with requirements. (shrink)

According to a common view, prejudice always involves some form of epistemic culpability, i.e., a failure to respond to evidence in the appropriate way. I argue that the common view wrongfully assumes that prejudices always involve universal generalizations. After motivating the more plausible thesis that prejudices typically involve a species of generic judgment, I show that standard examples provide no grounds for positing a strong connection between prejudice and epistemic culpability. More generally, the common view fails to recognize the extent (...) to which prejudices are epistemically insidious: once they are internalized as background beliefs, they quite reasonably come to control the assessment and interpretation of new evidence. This property of insidiousness helps explain why prejudices are so recalcitrant to empirical counterevidence and also why they are frequently invisible to introspective reflection. (shrink)

If someone says, “You’ve stereotyped me,” we hear the statement as an accusation. One way to interpret the accusation is as follows: you haven’t seen or treated me as an individual. In this essay, I interpret and evaluate a theory of wrongful stereotyping inspired by this thought, which I call the failure-to-individualize theory of wrongful stereotyping. According to this theory, stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves failing to treat persons as individuals. I argue that the theory—however one (...) interprets it—is inadequate. Either the theory will not reliably identify all cases of wrongful stereotyping or it will fail to adequately explain why they are wrong. I conclude that it does not follow that we must entirely jettison the objection that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals. What follows is only that the objection must play a more circumscribed role in a theory of when and why stereotyping is wrong. (shrink)

We care not only about how people treat us, but also what they believe of us. If I believe that you’re a bad tipper given your race, I’ve wronged you. But, what if you are a bad tipper? It is commonly argued that the way racist beliefs wrong is that the racist believer either misrepresents reality, organizes facts in a misleading way that distorts the truth, or engages in fallacious reasoning. In this paper, I present a case that challenges this (...) orthodoxy: the case of the supposedly rational racist. We live in a world that has been, and continues to be, structured by racist attitudes and institutions. As a result, the evidence might be stacked in favour of racist beliefs. But, if there are racist beliefs that reflect reality and are rationally justified, what could be wrong with them? Moreover, how do I wrong you by believing what I epistemically ought believe given the evidence? To address this challenge, we must recognize that there are not only epistemic norms governing belief, but moral ones as well. This view, however, is at odds with the assumption that moral obligation requires a kind of voluntary control that we lack with regard to our beliefs. This background assumption motivates many philosophers to try to explain away the appearance that beliefs can wrong by locating the wrong elsewhere, e.g., in an agent’s actions. Further, even accounts that accept the thesis that racist beliefs can wrong restrict the class of beliefs that wrong to beliefs that are either false or the result of hot irrationality, e.g., the racist belief is a result of ill-will. In this paper I argue that although the these accounts will capture many of the wrongs associated with racist beliefs, they will be only partial explanations because they cannot explain the wrong committed by the supposedly rational racist. The challenge posed by the supposedly rational racist concerns our epistemic practices in a non-ideal world. The world is an unjust place, and there may be many morally objectionable beliefs it justifies. To address this challenge, we must seriously consider the thesis people wrong others in virtue of what they believe about them, and not just in virtue of what they do. (shrink)

Platonic arguments often have premises of a particular form which is misunderstood. These sentences look like universal generalizations, but in fact involve an implicit qua phrase which makes them a fundamentally different kind of predication. Such general implicit redoubled qua predications (girqps) are not an expression of Plato's proprietary views; they are also very common in everyday discourse. Seeing how they work in Plato can help us to understand them.

I show that some of the most initially attractive routes of refuting epistemological solipsism face serious obstacles. I also argue that for creatures like ourselves, solipsism is a genuine form of external world skepticism. I suggest that together these claims suggest the following morals: No proposed solution to external world skepticism can succeed which does not also solve the problem of epistemological solipsism. And, more tentatively: In assessing proposed solutions to external world skepticism, epistemologists should explicitly consider whether those solutions (...) extend to knowledge of other minds. Finally, and also tentatively: epistemological solipsism warrants more philosophical attention than it currently enjoys. (shrink)

One of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch's insights give us important resources for making progress on the 'feasibility question' (...) in conceptual engineering: the question of how we can implement conceptual engineering projects in ways that are practically feasible. Specifically, I show that one overlooked upshot of Rosch's work is that naming practices play an extremely important role in the construction of perceived similarities within and dissimilarities between categories, and, correspondingly, the dissemination of social stereotypes that serve as markers between different categories that are otherwise similar. Thus, naming practices will be a crucial constraint for the feasibility of certain ameliorative projects. (shrink)

A philosopher’s case for the importance of good—if ethically questionable—humor. A good sense of humor is key to the good life, but a joke taken too far can get anyone into trouble. Where to draw the line is not as simple as it may seem. After all, even the most innocent quips between friends rely on deception, sarcasm, and stereotypes and often run the risk of disrespect, meanness, and harm. How do we face this dilemma without taking ourselves too seriously? (...) In Wisecracks, philosopher David Shoemaker examines this interplay between humor and morality and ultimately argues that even morally suspect humor is an essential part of ethical life. Shoemaker shows how improvised “wisecracks” between family and friends—unlike scripted stand-up, sketches, or serials—help us develop a critical human skill: the ability to carry on and find the funny in tragedy. In developing a new ethics of humor in defense of questionable gibes, Wisecracks offers a powerful case for humor as a healing presence in human life. (shrink)

Generics about social kinds (or GSKs) frequently propagate descriptions that carry normative force (e.g., 'women are emotional'). Some philosophers of language attribute this to GSKs’ tendency to transmit essentialist beliefs about social kinds. According to these accounts, utterances of GSKs implicate that there is something in the nature of social kinds that causes them to possess the properties described, and that individual members of these social kinds therefore ought to exhibit (or be expected to exhibit) these properties. Here, I draw (...) on empirical evidence to suggest an alternative account. According to my framework, an utterance of a GSK implicates a distinction between the social kind described and its salient conceptual opposite, producing what I call a dichotomizing perspective. For example, ‘women are emotional’ suggests that men are not. Importantly, such distinctions frequently persist in the societal common ground as a function of social power, in part due to their alignment with hierarchical social structures between dichotomized social kinds. This enables such GSKs to perpetuate biased patterns of attention, expectation, and behavior even in the absence of essentialist belief. (shrink)

Some generic sentences seem to be true despite the fact that almost all the members of the relevant kind are exceptions. It’s controversial whether generics of this type express relatively weak generalizations or relatively strong ones. If the latter, then we’re systematically mistaken about their truth, but they make no trouble for our semantic theorizing. In this brief note, I present several arguments for the former: sentences of the relevant type are weak generics.

We can enrich the explanation of how we should treat kid wrongdoers by recognizing that it matters who does the blaming and punishing. That we should think about who does the blaming and punishing is perhaps unsurprising, but it is nonetheless often underappreciated. Here, I offer two lessons about blame and punishment by thinking about who judges kids. First, the right account of moral and legal responsibility should allow that kids may rightly blame each other, and I argue that we (...) can best accommodate this by relativizing the threshold of competence needed for responsibility. Second, although each kid is an individual and, as a result, the implications of immaturity vary signifi- cantly from kid to kid, we should give kids a break as kids, that is, based on our categorizing them as kids. That we should and do categorize in that way reflects the nature of the criminal justice system as an institution and the nature of us as social beings. (shrink)

This chapter is centered around an apparent tension that research on implicit bias raises between virtue and social knowledge. Research suggests that simply knowing what the prevalent stereotypes are leads individuals to act in prejudiced ways—biasing decisions about whom to trust and whom to ignore, whom to promote and whom to imprison—even if they reflectively reject those stereotypes. Because efforts to combat discrimination obviously depend on knowledge of stereotypes, a question arises about what to do next. This chapter argues that (...) the obstacle to virtue is not knowledge of stereotypes as such, but the “accessibility” of such knowledge to the agent who has it. “Accessibility” refers to how easily knowledge comes to mind. Social agents can acquire the requisite knowledge of stereotypes while resisting their pernicious influence, so long as that knowledge remains, in relevant contexts, relatively inaccessible. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Against recent work by Haslanger and Leslie, I argue that we do not yet have good reason to think that we should single out generics about social groups out as peculiarly destructive, or that we should strive to eradicate them from our usage. Indeed, I suggest they continue to serve a very valuable purpose and we should not rush to condemn them.

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 (...) P due to category membership C”), generic claims (“Cs have P”), and the generalization of category properties to individual category members when kind membership and social position are confounded. Our findings thus challenge these phenomena as signatures of internalist thinking. However, once category membership and structural position are unconfounded, different patterns of generalization emerge across internalist and structural construals, as do different judgments concerning category definitions and the dispensability of properties for category membership. We discuss the broader implications of these findings for accounts of formal explanation, generic language, and kind representation. (shrink)

Conceptual Engineering alleges that philosophical problems are best treated via revising or replacing our concepts (or words). The goal here is not to defend Conceptual Engineering but rather show that it can (and should) invoke Neutralism—the broad view that philosophical progress can take place when (and sometimes only when) a thoroughly neutral, non-specific theory, treatment, or methodology is adopted. A neutralist treatment of one form of skepticism is used as a case study and is compared with various non-neutral rivals. Along (...) the way, a new taxonomy for paradox is proposed. (shrink)

Linguistic interventions aim to change our linguistic practices. A commonly discussed type of linguistic intervention is meaning revision, which seeks to associate existing words with new or revised meanings. But why does retaining old words matter so much? Why not instead introduce new words to express the newly defined meanings? Drawing on relevant psycholinguistic research, this paper develops an empirically motivated, general, and practically useful pro tanto reason to retain rather than replace the original word during the process of conceptual (...) improvement. (shrink)

We are sceptical of concerns over the opacity of algorithmic decision tools. While transparency and explainability are certainly important desiderata in algorithmic governance, we worry that automated decision-making is being held to an unrealistically high standard, possibly owing to an unrealistically high estimate of the degree of transparency attainable from human decision-makers. In this paper, we review evidence demonstrating that much human decision-making is fraught with transparency problems, show in what respects AI fares little worse or better and argue that (...) at least some regulatory proposals for explainable AI could end up setting the bar higher than is necessary or indeed helpful. The demands of practical reason require the justification of action to be pitched at the level of practical reason. Decision tools that support or supplant practical reasoning should not be expected to aim higher than this. We cast this desideratum in terms of Daniel Dennett’s theory of the “intentional stance” and argue that since the justification of action for human purposes takes the form of intentional stance explanation, the justification of algorithmic decisions should take the same form. In practice, this means that the sorts of explanations for algorithmic decisions that are analogous to intentional stance explanations should be preferred over ones that aim at the architectural innards of a decision tool. (shrink)

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.

A central debate in philosophy of race is between eliminativists and conservationists about what we ought do with ‘race’ talk. ‘Eliminativism’ is often defined such that it’s committed to holding that (a) ‘race’ is vacuous and races don’t exist, so (b) we should eliminate the term ‘race’ from our vocabulary. As a stipulative definition, that’s fine. But as an account of one of the main theoretical options in the debate, it’s a serious mistake. I offer three arguments for why eliminativism (...) should not be tethered to vacuity or error theory, and three arguments for why the view shouldn’t be understood in terms of eliminating the term ‘race’ from our vocabulary. Instead, I propose we understand the debate as concerning whether certain uses of ordinary race terms are typically wrong. This proposal is quite simple, and naturally suggested by the common gloss that eliminativism about ‘race’ is akin to a commonsensical view about 'witch' talk. But nonetheless, I argue that it offers a significant recharacterization of this core debate in philosophy of race. (shrink)

We can understand implicit bias as a person’s disposition to evaluate members of a social group in a less favorable light than members of another social group, without intending to do so. If we understand it this way, we should not presuppose a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how implicit cognitive states lead to skewed evaluations of other people. The focus of this paper is on implicit bias in considered decisions. It is argued that we have good reasons to (...) assume that imagination plays a vital role in decision making. If this assumption is correct, it offers an explanation for implicit bias in many considered decisions: Human beings who have been frequently exposed to stereotypes have stereotype-congruent expectations as part of their background knowledge. They feed into their imagination, sometimes without their awareness. This model would allow us to explain the key characteristics of implicit bias without recurring to any unconscious attitudes over and above such background knowledge. (shrink)

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 (...) explanatory domain. I argue that this notion of genericity is too narrow, excluding properties characteristic for kinds that go unrecognized in such explanatory domains. In particular, Nickel’s theory excludes some characteristic properties of anthropic kinds, such as lilies and cedars, members of which have properties that may be similarly exploited in various human practices despite having divergent geneses. I argue for a generalization of Nickel’s view of genericity where explicability of presence is only one sort of genericity, with others, such as practicability, being possible too. (shrink)

The neutral counterpart assumption is widely accepted in the study of slurs. It provides a simple and effective explanation for the meaning of slurs. Slurring terms are coextensional with their neutral counterparts. However, Lauren Ashwell (2016) has questioned this assumption. She argues that gendered slurs refer to a subset of their neutral counterparts. Hence, slurs are not coextensional with their counterparts. She goes on to present a view that is not based on the counterpart assumption. Still, her view is a (...) unifying view of slurs as it also applies to ethnic and racial slurs. In this paper, I defend the counterpart assumption with a generic view of slurs. While being a unifying view, it accommodates the subset argument with its eponymous feature that the meaning of slurs involves a generic component. (shrink)

Michael Dummett has proposed an influential analysis of the meaning of ethnic and racial slurs based on inferential rules. Timothy Williamson, however, finds the analysis problematic. It does not seem to explain how slurs are actually used. Williamson’s challenge for the inferentialist account of slurs has not gone unnoticed. In this article, I first discuss the debate between the inferentialists and Williamson. I argue that the inferentialist responses concentrate on the wrong issue and the real issue in Williamson’s challenge is (...) left untouched. I go on to specify his challenge and offer a solution to the challenge. The solution rests on the idea that the inferential rules for slurs involve a generic component. (shrink)

This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between slurring terms and their neutral counterparts with an inferentialist view of slurs. I argue that slurs and their counterparts are coextensional with contrasting senses. Crucially, the proposed inferentialist view overcomes the combination of two challenges: Kaplanian inferences and the substitution argument. The previous views cannot account for both of them.

Generic statements express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. Experiment 2 examined an alternative (...) hypothesis for this result, and Experiments 3 and 4 served as conceptual replications of the first experiment. Experiment 5 found that even preschoolers apply generics differently for humans and artifacts. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that these effects reflect differences between human and non-human categories more generally, as adults showed a negativity bias for categories of non-human animals, but not for categories of humans. These findings suggest the presence of important, early-emerging domain differences in people's judgments about generics. (shrink)

An adequate semantics for generic sentences must stake out positions across a range of contested territory in philosophy and linguistics. For this reason the study of generic sentences is a venue for investigating different frameworks for understanding human rationality as manifested in linguistic phenomena such as quantification, classification of individuals under kinds, defeasible reasoning, and intensionality. Despite the wide variety of semantic theories developed for generic sentences, to date these theories have been almost universally model-theoretic and representational. This essay outlines (...) a range of proof-theoretic analyses for characterizing generics. Particular attention is given to an expressivist proof-theory that can be traced to 1) work on logical syntax that Carnap undertook prior to his turn toward truth-conditional model theory in the late 1930s, and 2) research on sequent calculi and natural deduction systems that originate in work from Gentzen and Prawitz.1. (shrink)

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 (...) stereotypes. Each of the two components of the theory entails a family of fallacies that contributes to the spurious reinforcement of stereotypes: inferential slippage within and between the different generic forms, and inferential slippage from facts about frequencies of group traits to beliefs about natural propensities or dispositions of groups. Empirical research suggests that we often commit these fallacies. Moreover, this theory can referee a vitriolic debate between some psychologists, who hold that stereotypes are always false and stereotyping is always wrong, and other psychologists, who hold that stereotypes are often accurate and stereotyping is often reasonable. (shrink)

This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics :375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117:1–47, 2008): her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations.

Court cases involving sexual assault and police violence rely heavily on victim testimony. We consider what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument (TUA)” according to which we should be skeptical about victim testimony because people are particularly liable to misremember traumatic events. The TUA is not obviously based in mere distrust of women, people of color, disabled people, poor people, etc. Rather, it seeks to justify skepticism on epistemic and empirical grounds. We consider how the TUA might appeal to the (...) psychology and neuroscience of memory for empirical support. However, we argue that neither support the TUA. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSeveral philosophers have inquired into the metaphysical limits of conceptual engineering: ‘Can we engineer? And if so, to what extent?’. This paper is not concerned with answering these questions. It does concern itself, however, with the limits of conceptual engineering, albeit in a largely unexplored sense: it cares about the normative, rather than about the metaphysical limits thereof. I first defend an optimistic claim: I argue that the ameliorative project has, so far, been too modest; there is little value theoretic (...) reason to restrict the project to remedying deficient representational devices, rather than go on a more ambitious quest: conceptual improvement. That being said, I also identify a limitation to the optimistic claim: I show that the ‘should’ in ameliorative projects suffers from a ‘wrong-kind-of-reasons’ problem. Last but not least, I sketch a proposal of normative constraining meant to address both the above results. The proposal gives primacy to epistemic constraints: accordingly, a concept should be ameliorated only insofar as this does not translate into epistemic loss. (shrink)

Can we engineer conceptual change? While a positive answer to this question would be exciting news for philosophy, there has been a growing number of pessimistic voices in the literature. This paper resists this trend. Its central aim is to argue not only that conceptual engineering is possible but also that it is not even distinctively hard. In order to achieve this, we will develop a novel approach to conceptual engineering that has two key components. First, it proposes a reorientation (...) of the conceptual engineering project away from fixing conceptual defects and towards bringing about conceptual innovation. Second, it offers a new account of when conceptual engineering is successful in terms of etiological functions. We then turn to the reasons that have motivated various forms of pessimism about conceptual engineering and show that, on our novel approach, none of them stands up to scrutiny. (shrink)

In this paper I explore a method for refusing uptake when explanations are morally and epistemically troubling. Gaile Pohlhaus Jr has shown that imploring marginalised people to “understand” marginalising practices amounts to a request that they legitimise their own marginalisation. In this paper, I expand upon this analysis with the aim of describing a method for withholding understanding. First, I analyse understanding through its association with explanation. Drawing on pragmatic theories, I describe explanations as speech acts whose success depends on (...) the explainee granting the explainer uptake by revising their background assumptions. Those background assumptions sometimes reference troubling generalisations, and in those cases, the explanation must be blocked. Accordingly, I formalise a form of explanatory resistance in which the explainee feigns misunderstanding to corner the explainer into exposing the problematic assumptions upon which their explanation depends. Second, I situate wrongful requests for understanding within the epistemic injustice schema as “explanatory injustices,” emphasising the fact that marginalised groups are also specifically marginalised within the explanation economy. I conclude that we should be more cognisant of the way in which explanations track power, and be prepared to undertake resistance in order to expose moral and epistemic shortcomings in how we explain. (shrink)

We are often justified in acting on the basis of evidential confirmation. I argue that such evidence supports belief in non-quantificational generic generalizations, rather than universally quantified generalizations. I show how this account supports, rather than undermines, a Bayesian account of confirmation. Induction from confirming instances of a generalization to belief in the corresponding generic is part of a reasoning instinct that is typically (but not always) correct, and allows us to approximate the predictions that formal epistemology would make.

I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...) dubious, along with more familiar cases of negative profiling, and why profiling is suspect even when no particular action is at stake. My suspension-based view, while compatible with revisionary normative positions, does not presuppose them. Philosophers of all stripes can reject demographic profiling both in thought and deed. (shrink)

Recently several philosophers have argued that racial, gender, and other social generic generalizations should be avoided given their propensity to promote essentialist thinking, obscure the social nature of categories, and contribute to oppression. Here I argue that a general prohibition against social generics goes too far. Given that the truth of many generics require regularities or systematic rather than mere accidental correlations, they are our best means for describing structural forms of violence and discrimination. Moreover, their accuracy, their persistence in (...) the face of counterexamples, and features of the contemporary socio-political context make generics useful linguistic tools in social justice projects. (shrink)

Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the (...) propensities for our representational devices to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice. (shrink)