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  1. Reconceptualising the Psychological Theory of Generics.Tom Ralston - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-23.
    Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing a theory of the meaning of (...)
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  • Tell me your (cognitive) budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.David Kinney & Tania Lombrozo - 2024 - Cognition 247 (C):105782.
    Consider the following two (hypothetical) generic causal claims: “Living in a neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles” and “living in an affluent neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles.” These claims not only differ in what they suggest about how bicycle ownership is distributed across different neighborhoods (i.e., “the data”), but also have the potential to communicate something about the speakers’ values: namely, the prominence they accord to affluence in representing and making decisions (...)
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  • Reasoning with Concepts: A Unifying Framework.Peter Gärdenfors & Matías Osta-Vélez - 2023 - Minds and Machines 1 (3):451-485.
    Over the past few decades, cognitive science has identified several forms of reasoning that make essential use of conceptual knowledge. Despite significant theoretical and empirical progress, there is still no unified framework for understanding how concepts are used in reasoning. This paper argues that the theory of conceptual spaces is capable of filling this gap. Our strategy is to demonstrate how various inference mechanisms which clearly rely on conceptual information—including similarity, typicality, and diagnosticity-based reasoning—can be modeled using principles derived from (...)
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  • Reasoning with Concepts: A Unifying Framework.Gardenfors Peter & Osta-Vélez Matías - 2023 - Minds and Machines.
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  • ”That’s Just a Conspiracy Theory!”: Relevant Alternatives, Dismissive Conversational Exercitives, and the Problem of Premature Conclusions.Rico Hauswald - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (4):494-509.
    Drawing on the relevant alternatives framework and Mary Kate McGowan’s work on conversational scorekeeping, I argue that usage of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ in ordinary language and public discourse typically entails the performance of what I call a dismissive conversational exercitive, a kind of speech act that functions to exclude certain propositions from (or prevent their inclusion in) the set of alternatives considered relevant in a given conversational context. While it can be legitimate to perform dismissive conversational exercitives, excluding alternatives (...)
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  • Moral Principles as Generics.Ravi Thakral - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (2):205-224.
    I argue that moral principles involve the same sort of generalization as ordinary yet elusive generic generalizations in natural language such as ‘Tigers are striped’ or ‘Peppers are spicy’. A notable advantage of the generic view is that it simultaneously allows for pessimism and optimism about the role and status of moral principles in our lives. It provides a new perspective on the nature of moral principles on which principles are not apt for determining the moral status of particular actions (...)
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  • Generics: some (non) specifics.Anne Bosse - 2021 - Synthese (5-6):14383-14401.
    This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.
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  • Generics and Experimental Philosophy.Adam Lerner - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 404-416.
    Theorists have had less success in analyzing the truth conditions of generics. Philosophers of language have offered a number of theories. This chapter surveys several semantic accounts of generics. However, the focus is on generics and experimental philosophy. It briefly reviews empirical work that bears on these semantic accounts. While generics constitute an interesting linguistic phenomenon worthy of study in their own right, the study of generics also has wide‐ranging implications for questions beyond the philosophy of language, including questions in (...)
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  • Generics, generalism, and reflective equilibrium: Implications for moral theorizing from the study of language.Adam Lerner & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2013 - Philosophical Perspectives 27 (1):366-403.
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  • “Hillary Clinton is the Only Man in the Obama Administration”: Dual Character Concepts, Generics, and Gender.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2015 - Analytic Philosophy 56 (2):111-141.
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  • The acquisition of generics.James Ravi Kirkpatrick - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (4):492-517.
    It has been argued that the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for standard quantificational approaches to generics and instead motivates the claim that generics give voice to an innate, default mode of generalising. This article argues that analogous puzzles involving the acquisition of A‐quantifiers undermine the empirical support for a purely cognition‐based approach to generics. Instead, these acquisition puzzles should be solved by generalising the core insight of the cognitive defaults theory to these expressions, (...)
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  • Language Signaling High Proportions and Generics Lead to Generalizing, but Not Essentializing, for Novel Social Kinds.Elena Hoicka, Jennifer Saul, Eloise Prouten, Laura Whitehead & Rachel Sterken - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (11):e13051.
    Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.
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  • Resisting Wrongful Explanations.Arianne Shahvisi - 2021 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 19 (2).
    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 (...)
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  • Generics Oversimplified.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2015 - Noûs 49 (1):28-54.
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  • Genericity is Easy? Formal and Experimental Perspectives.Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Napoleon Katsos & Linnaea Stockall - 2015 - Ratio 28 (4):470-494.
    In this paper, we compare the formal semantics approach to genericity, within which genericity is viewed as a species of quantification, and a growing body of experimental and developmental work on the topic, mainly by psychologists rather than linguists, proposing that genericity is categorically different from quantification. We argue that this generics-as-default hypothesis is much less well supported by evidence than its supporters contend, and that a research program combining theoretical and experimental research methods and considerations in the same studies (...)
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  • Flexible Acceptance Condition of Generics from a Probabilistic Viewpoint: Towards Formalization of the Semantics of Generics.Soo Hyun Ryu, Wonsuk Yang & Jong C. Park - 2022 - Journal Of Psycholinguistic Research.
    Formalization of the semantics of generics has been considered extremely challenging for their inherent vagueness and context-dependence that hinder a single fixed truth condition. The present study suggests a way to formalize the semantics of generics by constructing flexible acceptance conditions with comparative probabilities. Findings from our in-depth psycholinguistic experiment show that two comparative probabilities—cue validity and prevalence—indeed construct the flexible acceptance conditions for generics in a systematic manner that can be applied to a diverse types of generics: Acceptability of (...)
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  • Generic Generalizations in Science: A Bridge to Everyday Language.François Claveau & Jordan Girard - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (4):839-859.
    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 (...)
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  • Genericity as a Unitary Psychological Phenomenon: An Argument from Linguistic Diversity.John Collins - 2015 - Ratio 28 (4):369-394.
    So-called ‘generics’ are members of a diverse class of constructions that express generalisations that do not directly involve any precise cardinality of individuals, but rather the kinds or ‘typical’ or ‘normal’ members of the kinds contributed by arguments of the predicate. The paper argues that genericity as a unitary phenomenon of human thought has a psychological, rather than linguistic, basis. This claim is argued for by way of a survey of the linguistic diversity of the forms of genericity, and the (...)
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  • Are formal explanations mere placeholders or pointers?Shamauri Rivera, Sam Prasad & Sandeep Prasada - 2023 - Cognition 235 (C):105407.
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  • Stable Causal Relationships Are Better Causal Relationships.Nadya Vasilyeva, Thomas Blanchard & Tania Lombrozo - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (4):1265-1296.
    We report three experiments investigating whether people’s judgments about causal relationships are sensitive to the robustness or stability of such relationships across a range of background circumstances. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that people are more willing to endorse causal and explanatory claims based on stable (as opposed to unstable) relationships, even when the overall causal strength of the relationship is held constant. In Experiment 2, we show that this effect is not driven by a causal generalization’s actual scope of (...)
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  • The development of principled connections and kind representations.Paul Haward, Laura Wagner, Susan Carey & Sandeep Prasada - 2018 - Cognition 176 (C):255-268.
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  • Are stereotypes accurate? A perspective from the cognitive science of concepts.Lin Bian & Andrei Cimpian - 2017 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40.
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  • Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to Categories.Shelbie L. Sutherland, Andrei Cimpian, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan A. Gelman - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (5):1021-1046.
    Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal (...)
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  • Explaining systematic polysemy: kinds and individuation.Katherine Ritchie & Sandeep Prasada - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
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  • Generic Language for Social and Animal Kinds: An Examination of the Asymmetry Between Acceptance and Inferences.Federico Cella, Kristan A. Marchak, Claudia Bianchi & Susan A. Gelman - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (12):e13209.
    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 (...)
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  • Do All Eagles Fly High? The Generic Overgeneralization Effect: The Impact of Fillers in Truth Value Judgment Tasks.Daniel Karczewski & Edyta Wajda - 2020 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 61 (1):147-162.
    The generic overgeneralization effect is an attested tendency to accept false universal generalizations such as “all eagles fly” or “all snakes lay eggs” as true. In this paper, we discuss the generic overgeneralization effect demonstrated by Polish adult speakers. We asked 313 native speakers of Polish to evaluate universal quantified generalizations such as “all eagles fly” or “all snakes lay eggs” as true or false. The control group of 107 respondents provided data on the acceptance rates of the corresponding generic (...)
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  • The representation of inherent properties.Sandeep Prasada - 2014 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5):500-500.
    Research on the representation of generic knowledge suggests that inherent properties can have either a principled or a causal connection to a kind. The type of connection determines whether the outcome of the storytelling process will include intuitions of inevitability and a normative dimension and whether it will ground causal explanations.
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  • Rational learners and parochial norms.Scott Partington, Shaun Nichols & Tamar Kushnir - 2023 - Cognition 233 (C):105366.
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  • The Formal Structure of Kind Representations.Paul Haward, Susan Carey & Sandeep Prasada - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (10):e13040.
    Kind representations, concepts like table, triangle, dog, and planet, underlie generic language. Here, we investigate the formal structure of kind representations—the structure that distinguishes kind representations from other types of representations. The present studies confirm that participants distinguish generic‐supporting properties of individuals (e.g., this watch is made of steel) and accidental properties (e.g., this watch is on the nightstand). Furthermore, work dating back to Aristotle establishes that only some generic‐supporting properties bear a principled connection to the kind, that is, are (...)
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  • Refining and expanding the proposal of an inherence heuristic in human understanding.Andrei Cimpian & Erika Salomon - 2014 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5):506-527.
    The inherence heuristic is a cognitive process that supplies quick and effortless explanations for a wide variety of observations. Due in part to biases in memory retrieval, this heuristic tends to overproduce explanations that appeal to the inherent features of the entities in the observations being explained. In this response, we use the commentators' input to clarify, refine, and expand the inherence heuristic model. The end result is a piece that complements the target article, amplifying its theoretical contribution.
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  • Concepts, analysis, generics and the canberra plan.Mark Johnston & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):113-171.
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  • Generic Generalizations.Sarah-Jane Leslie & Adam Lerner - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Teleological generics.Joanna Korman & Sangeet Khemlani - 2020 - Cognition 200 (C):104157.
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  • The physical basis of conceptual representation – An addendum to.Sandeep Prasada - 2021 - Cognition 214 (C):104751.
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  • Explanations in the wild.Justin Sulik, Jeroen van Paridon & Gary Lupyan - 2023 - Cognition 237 (C):105464.
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  • Generalizing About Striking Properties: Do Glippets Love to Play With Fire?Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Napoleon Katsos & Linnaea Stockall - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
    Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to whether the content of a generalization is about a salient or noteworthy property (henceforth “striking”) and whether varying the number of exceptions has any effect on children’s willingness to extend a property after having heard a generalization. Moreover, they investigated how the content of a generalization interacts with exception tolerance. Adult data were collected for comparison. We used generalizations to describe novel kinds (e.g., “glippets”) that had either a neutral (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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