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  1. Generics and Quantified Generalizations: Asymmetry Effects and Strategic Communicators.Kevin Reuter, Eleonore Neufeld & Guillermo Del Pinal - 2025 - Cognition 256 (C):106004.
    Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and developmentally early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work suggests that generics display a unique asymmetry between the prevalence levels required to accept them and the prevalence levels typically implied by their use. This asymmetry effect is thought to have serious social consequences: if speakers use socially problematic generics based on prevalence levels that are systematically lower than what is typically inferred by their recipients, then using generics will (...)
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  • Rearticulated Psychological View of Generics and Worldly Truthmakers.Pasi Valtonen - 2023 - In Panu Raatikainen (ed.), _Essays in the Philosophy of Language._ Acta Philosophica Fennica Vol. 100. Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica. pp. 345-368.
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  • Commemoration and constriction.Chong-Ming Lim - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics:1-20.
    In analysing the problems with commemorative artefacts, philosophers have tended to focus on objectionable monuments that honour inappropriate subjects. The problems with such monuments, however, do not exhaust problems with a society’s public commemorative landscape – the totality of public commemorative artefacts in general, and the institutions involved in their creation and maintenance. I argue that a public commemorative landscape can implicate authoritative ideas, including stereotypes about people in virtue of their group membership. This contributes to what I term hermeneutical (...)
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  • Reconceptualising the Psychological Theory of Generics.Tom Ralston - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (11):2973-2995.
    Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing a theory of the meaning of (...)
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  • 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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  • The Natural Probability Theory of Stereotypes.Jacob Stegenga - 2023 - Diametros:1-27.
    A stereotype is a belief or claim that a group of people has a particular feature. Stereotypes are expressed by sentences that have the form of generic statements, like “Canadians are nice.” Recent work on generics lends new life to understanding generics as statements involving probabilities. I argue that generics (and thus sentences expressing stereotypes) can take one of several forms involving conditional probabilities, and these probabilities have what I call a naturalness requirement. This is the natural probability theory of (...)
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  • All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities.Aaron D. Lightner & Edward H. Hagen - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (4):425-462.
    Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining (...)
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  • (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 (...)
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  • Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory.Erin Beeghly - 2021 - Social Epistemology 35 (6):547-563.
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Children's and adults' understanding of punishment and the criminal justice system.James Dunlea - 2020 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 87.
    Adults' judgments regarding punishment can have important social ramifications. However, the origins of these judgments remain unclear. Using the legal system as an example domain in which people receive punishment, the current work employed two complementary approaches to examine how punishment-related concepts emerge. Study 1 tested both 6- to 8-year-olds and adults to ascertain which components of “end-state” pun- ishment concepts emerge early in development and remain stable over time, and which components of pun- ishment concepts change with age. Children, (...)
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  • Examining Infants’ Individuation of Others by Sociomoral Disposition.Hernando Taborda-Osorio, Ashley B. Lyons & Erik W. Cheries - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
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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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  • The essence of essentialism.George E. Newman & Joshua Knobe - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (5):585-605.
    Over the past several decades, psychological essentialism has been an important topic of study, incorporating research from multiple areas of psychology, philosophy and linguistics. At its most basic level, essentialism is the tendency to represent certain concepts in terms of a deeper, unobservable property that is responsible for category membership. Originally, this concept was used to understand people’s reasoning about natural kind concepts, such as TIGER and WATER, but more recently, researchers have identified the emergence of essentialist-like intuitions in a (...)
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  • 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.
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  • Character and theory of mind: an integrative approach.Evan Westra - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (5):1217-1241.
    Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a hierarchical system (...)
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  • Cultural Appropriation Without Cultural Essentialism?Erich Hatala Matthes - 2016 - Social Theory and Practice 42 (2):343-366.
    Is there something morally wrong with cultural appropriation in the arts? I argue that the little philosophical work on this topic has been overly dismissive of moral objections to cultural appropriation. Nevertheless, I argue that philosophers working on epistemic injustice have developed powerful conceptual tools that can aid in our understanding of objections that have been levied by other scholars and artists. I then consider the relationship between these objections and the harms of cultural essentialism. I argue that focusing on (...)
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  • 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.
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  • Dehumanization, Essentialism, and Moral Psychology.David Livingstone Smith - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (11):814-824.
    Despite its importance, the phenomenon of dehumanization has been neglected by philosophers. Since its introduction, the term “dehumanization” has come to be used in a variety of ways. In this paper, I use it to denote the psychological stance of conceiving of other human beings as subhuman creatures. I draw on an historical example – Morgan Godwyn's description of 17th century English colonists' dehumanization of African slaves and use this to identify three explanatory desiderata that any satisfactory theory of dehumanization (...)
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  • Fair Numbers: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About the Underrepresentation of Women in Philosophy.Yann Benétreau-Dupin & Guillaume Beaulac - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2:59-81.
    The low representation (< 30%) of women in philosophy in English-speaking countries has generated much discussion, both in academic circles and the public sphere. It is sometimes suggested (Haslanger 2009) that unconscious biases, acting at every level in the field, may be grounded in gendered schemas of philosophers and in the discipline more widely, and that actions to make philosophy a more welcoming place for women should address such schemas. However, existing data are too limited to fully warrant such an (...)
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  • The Epistemology of Prejudice.Endre Begby - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):90-99.
    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 (...)
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  • Stereotype Threat and Attributional Ambiguity for Trans Women.Rachel McKinnon - 2014 - Hypatia 29 (1):857-872.
    In this paper I discuss the interrelated topics of stereotype threat and attributional ambiguity as they relate to gender and gender identity. The former has become an emerging topic in feminist philosophy and has spawned a tremendous amount of research in social psychology and elsewhere. But the discussion, at least in how it connects to gender, is incomplete: the focus is only on cisgender women and their experiences. By considering trans women's experiences of stereotype threat and attributional ambiguity, we gain (...)
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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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  • Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction.Zoe Finiasz, Susan A. Gelman & Tamar Kushnir - 2024 - Cognition 244 (C):105707.
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  • Groups as institutions: The use of constitutive rules to attribute group membership.Alexander Noyes & Yarrow Dunham - 2020 - Cognition 196 (C):104143.
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  • Generic Generalizations.Sarah-Jane Leslie & Adam Lerner - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Children's Developing Intuitions About the Truth Conditions and Implications of Novel Generics Versus Quantified Statements.Amanda C. Brandone, Susan A. Gelman & Jenna Hedglen - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (4):711-738.
    Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by all, most, and some. Results reveal that, like adults, preschoolers recognize that generics have flexible truth conditions and are capable of representing a wide range of prevalence levels; and interpret novel generics as having near-universal prevalence implications. Results further (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Artifacts and Essentialism.Susan A. Gelman - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3):449-463.
    Psychological essentialism is an intuitive folk belief positing that certain categories have a non-obvious inner “essence” that gives rise to observable features. Although this belief most commonly characterizes natural kind categories, I argue that psychological essentialism can also be extended in important ways to artifact concepts. Specifically, concepts of individual artifacts include the non-obvious feature of object history, which is evident when making judgments regarding authenticity and ownership. Classic examples include famous works of art (e.g., the Mona Lisa is authentic (...)
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  • The role of exceptions in children's and adults' judgments about generic statements.Ella Simmons & Susan A. Gelman - 2025 - Cognition 255 (C):106016.
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  • Children's Explanations as a Window Into Their Intuitive Theories of the Social World.Marjorie Rhodes - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (8):1687-1697.
    Social categorization is an early emerging and robust component of social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of the social world has remained unclear. The present studies examined children's explanations of social behavior to provide a window into their intuitive theories of how social categories constrain human action. Children systematically referenced category memberships and social relationships as causal-explanatory factors for specific types of social interactions: harm among members of different categories more than harm among members (...)
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  • Mutual intentions as a causal framework for social groups.Alexander Noyes & Yarrow Dunham - 2017 - Cognition 162 (C):133-142.
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  • Generics Oversimplified.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2015 - Noûs 49 (1):28-54.
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  • Social categories are shaped by social experience.Sandra R. Waxman - 2012 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (11):531-532.
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  • So It Is, So It Shall Be: Group Regularities License Children's Prescriptive Judgments.Steven O. Roberts, Susan A. Gelman & Arnold K. Ho - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S3):576-600.
    When do descriptive regularities become prescriptive norms? We examined children's and adults' use of group regularities to make prescriptive judgments, employing novel groups that engaged in morally neutral behaviors. Participants were introduced to conforming or non-conforming individuals. Children negatively evaluated non-conformity, with negative evaluations declining with age. These effects were replicable across competitive and cooperative intergroup contexts and stemmed from reasoning about group regularities rather than reasoning about individual regularities. These data provide new insights into children's group concepts and have (...)
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  • The influence of linguistic form and causal explanations on the development of social essentialism.Josie Benitez, Rachel A. Leshin & Marjorie Rhodes - 2022 - Cognition 229 (C):105246.
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  • Property content guides children’s memory for social learning episodes.Anne E. Riggs, Charles W. Kalish & Martha W. Alibali - 2014 - Cognition 131 (2):243-253.
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  • Putting humanity back into the teaching of human biology.Brian M. Donovan - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52 (C):65-75.
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