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  1. (1 other version)Social Kind Generics and the Dichotomizing Perspective.Will Fraker - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 37:1328-1348.
    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 (...)
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  • 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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  • 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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  • Generics in Use.Annie Bosse - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Cambridge
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  • Generic cognition: A neglected source of context sensitivity.Mahrad Almotahari - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (4):472-491.
    What is the relationship between the claim that generics articulate psychologically primitive generalizations and the claim that they exhibit a unique form of context sensitivity? This article maintains that the two claims are compatible. It develops and defends an overlooked form of contextualism grounded in the idiosyncrasies of system 1 thought.
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  • Guilt, Blame, and Oppression: A Feminist Philosophy of Scapegoating.Celia Edell - 2022 - Dissertation, Mcgill University
    In this dissertation I develop a philosophical theory of scapegoating that explains the role of blame-shifting and guilt avoidance in the endurance of oppression. I argue that scapegoating masks and justifies oppression by shifting unwarranted blame onto marginalized groups and away from systems of oppression and those who benefit from them, such that people in dominant positions are less inclined to notice or challenge its workings. I first identify a gap in our understanding of oppression, namely how oppression endures despite (...)
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  • Asymmetry Effects in Generic and Quantified Generalizations.Kevin Reuter, Eleonore Neufeld & Guillermo Del Pinal - 2023 - Proceedings of the 45Th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45:1-6.
    Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...)
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  • Weak generics.Mahrad Almotahari - 2022 - Analysis 82 (3):405-409.
    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.
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  • Essentializing Language and the Prospects for Ameliorative Projects.Katherine Ritchie - 2021 - Ethics 131 (3):460-488.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)#BelieveWomen and the Ethics of Belief.Renee Bolinger - forthcoming - In NOMOS LXIV: Truth and Evidence. New York:
    ​I evaluate a suggestion, floated by Kimberly Ferzan (this volume), that the twitter hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen is best accommodated by non-reductionist views of testimonial justification. I argue that the issue is ultimately one about the ethical obligation to trust women, rather than a question of what grounds testimonial justification. I also suggest that the hashtag campaign does not simply assert that ‘we should trust women’, but also militates against a pernicious striking-property generic (roughly: ‘women make false sexual assault accusations’), that (...)
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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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  • A Structural Explanation of Injustice in Conversations: It's about Norms.Saray Ayala-López - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4):726-748.
    In contrast to individualistic explanations of social injustice that appeal to implicit attitudes, structural explanations are unintuitive: they appeal to entities that lack clear ontological status, and the explanatory mechanism is similarly unclear. This makes structural explanations unappealing. The present work proposes a structural explanation of one type of injustice that happens in conversations, discursive injustice. This proposal meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural (...)
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  • Statistics as Figleaves.Felix Bräuer - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):433-443.
    Recently, Jennifer Saul (“Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump”, 2017; “Racist and Sexist Figleaves”, 2021) has explored the use of what she calls “figleaves” in the discourse on race and gender. Following Saul, a figleaf is an utterance that, for some portion of the audience, blocks the conclusion that some other utterance, R, or the person who uttered R is racist or sexist. Such racial and gender figleaves are pernicious, says Saul, because, (...)
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  • Beyond accuracy: Epistemic flaws with statistical generalizations.Jessie Munton - 2019 - Philosophical Issues 29 (1):228-240.
    What, if anything, is epistemically wrong with beliefs involving accurate statistical generalizations about demographic groups? This paper argues that there is a perfectly general, underappreciated epistemic flaw which affects both ethically charged and uncharged statistical generalizations. Though common to both, this flaw can also explain why demographic statistical generalizations give rise to the concerns they do. To identify this flaw, we need to distinguish between the accuracy and the projectability of statistical beliefs. Statistical beliefs are accompanied by an implicit representation (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Slurs in quarantine.Bianca Cepollaro, Simone Sulpizio, Claudia Bianchi & Isidora Stojanovic - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (3):381-396.
    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 (...)
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  • Tragedy and the constancy of norms: towards an Anscombian conception of ‘ought’.Kristina Gehrman - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):3077-3097.
    This paper presents an Anscombian alternative to the traditional deontic conception of ought. According to the Anscombian conception of ought developed here, ought is general as opposed to ‘peculiarly moral’, norm-referring instead of law- or obligation-referring, and ‘heroic’ in the sense that it does not presuppose that individuals can do or be as they ought. Its connection to matters of fact can, moreover, be clearly stated. In the first part of the paper, I describe some significant logical characteristics of this (...)
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  • (1 other version)Stereotyping and generics.Anne Bosse - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (10):3876-3892.
    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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