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)

Scientists often communicate using generic generalizations, which are unquantified generalizations such as ‘Americans overestimate social class mobility’ or ‘sound waves carry gravitational mass’. In this paper, I explain the role of such generic generalizations in science, based on a novel theory about their characteristic meaning. According to this theory, a scientific generalization of the form ‘Ks are F’ says that F is one property based on which category K qualifies as a scientific kind. Because what it takes to qualify as (...) a scientific kind varies depending on the discipline, what a generic sentence entails also varies. Based on this semantic theory, I discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using generic language in science. (shrink)

Cimpian et al. observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gs are f’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still treat it inferentially in a much stronger way: all Gs are f. This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’, ‘contingency’ and ‘relative difference’ from psychology to provide a uniform semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. (...) The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie’s cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics will be grounded on a strengthening of Cohen’s relative readings of generic sentences. In contrast to Leslie and Cohen, we propose a uniform semantic analysis of generics. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f’ is true because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G. We will make use of Kahneman and Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases approach, according to which people tend to confuse questions about probability with questions about representativeness, to explain pragmatically why people treat many generic statements inferentially in a much stronger way. (shrink)

Many generic sentences express stable inductive generalizations. Stable inductive generalizations are typically true for a causal reason. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is also the case for the generalizations expressed by generic sentences. More in particular, we discuss the possibility that many generic sentences of the form ‘ks have feature e’ are true because kind k have the causal power to ‘produce’ feature e. We will argue that such an analysis is quite close to a probabilistic (...) based analysis of generic sentences according to which ‘relatively many’ ks have feature e, and that, in fact, this latter type of analysis can be ‘grounded’ in terms of causal powers. We will argue, moreover, that the causal power analysis is sometimes preferred to a correlation-based analysis, because it takes the causal structure that gives rise to the probabilistic data into account. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 574-601, July 2022.

In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguistic negotiation, speakers argue about (...) such issues implicitly, via competing “metalinguistic” usages of terms. Here, we argue that some disputes involving generics are best thought of as metalinguistic negotiations, and that these cases can be illuminating for our more general theorizing about generics. Specifically, we argue that the “contextualist” theory of generics that one of us (Sterken) has developed in other work is best equipped to account for these metalinguistic negotiations, relative to other leading views of generics. We thus argue for a “package deal” view of generics: a view that combines Plunkett and Sundell’s account of metalinguistic negotiation with Sterken’s contextualist view of generics. (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)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 451-466, July 2022.

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 (...) conceptual spaces. Our first topic analyzes the role of expectations in inductive reasoning and their relation to the structure of our concepts. We examine the relationship between using generic expressions in natural language and common-sense reasoning as a second topic. We propose that the strength of a generic can be described by distances between properties and prototypes in conceptual spaces. Our third topic is category-based induction. We demonstrate that the theory of conceptual spaces can serve as a comprehensive model for this type of reasoning. The final topic is analogy. We review some proposals in this area, present a taxonomy of analogical relations, and show how to model them in terms of distances in conceptual spaces. We also briefly discuss the implications of the model for reasoning with concepts in artificial systems. (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)

Scientists may sometimes generalize from their samples to broader populations when they have not yet sufficiently supported this generalization. Do such hasty generalizations also occur in experimental philosophy? To check, we analyzed 171 experimental philosophy studies published between 2017 and 2023. We found that most studies tested only Western populations but generalized beyond them without justification. There was also no evidence that studies with broader conclusions had larger, more diverse samples, but they nonetheless had higher citation impact. Our analyses reveal (...) important methodological limitations of many experimental philosophy studies and suggest that philosophical training may not protect against hasty generalizations. (shrink)

As is well known, research on generics is represented by three approaches: majority- based (Cohen 1996, 1999, 2004), normalcy-based (Nickel 2006; 2009; 2010a, b; 2013; 2016; 2018), and cognition-based (Leslie 2007a, b; 2008; 2013; 2017) approaches. Two recent approaches proposed by van Rooij and Schulz (2020) and Tessler and Goodman (2019) are more elaborated theories on generics, although neither of these approaches nor the three representative theories can fully account for various generics data, as argued by Yoon (2021). On the (...) other hand, Nguyen (2020) proposes another theory of generics, the so-called ‘radical’ theory, which argues that the generic operator has no semantic content, and that the various quantificational interpretations of bare plural generics are determined contextually. In this context, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of some recently published analyses, including Nguyen’s theory, and to analyze non-conventionalized generics. While conventionalized or conceptualized generics have received much attention from researchers, non- conventionalized generics have not been studied as extensively. It will be argued that Nguyen’s theory simply transfers the burden onto pragmatics, and that non- conventionalized as well as conventionalized generics tend to be interpreted based on people’s perceptions of their exceptions, in line with Yoon (2021). This position will be supported by experimental results. (shrink)

Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of individuals satisfy a certain (...) property—in the example above, it says that sufficiently many birds fly. This view faces the complicated problem of spelling out exactly how many is “sufficiently many” in a way that correctly captures the intuitive truth conditions of generics. -/- An alternative, the rules and regulations view, despairs from this project and proposes instead that generics directly express rules in the world. Rules are taken to be abstract objects, which are not related to the properties of specific individuals. This view faces the difficult problem of explaining how people come to know of such rules when judging the truth of falsity of generics, and accounting for the strong intuition that a sentence such as Birds fly talks about birds, not abstract objects. -/- What seems to be beyond dispute is that generics, even if they do not express rules, are lawlike: they state non-accidental generalizations. Many scholars have taken this fact to indicate that generics are parametric on possible worlds: they refer to worlds other than the actual world. This, again, raises the problem of how people come to know about what happens in these other worlds. However, a rigorous application of standard tests for intensionality shows that generics are not, in fact, parametric on possible worlds, but only on time. This unusual property may explain much of the mystery surrounding generics. -/- Another mysterious property of generics is that although there is no language without them, there is no linguistic construction that is devoted to the expression of genericity. Rather, generics can be expressed in a variety of ways, each of which can also express nongenerics. Yet, each manifestation of generics differs subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) in its meaning from the others. -/- Even when these and other puzzles of genericity are solved, one mystery would remain: Why are generics, which are so easy to produce and understand in conversation, so difficult to analyze? (shrink)