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36My Heart Made Me Do It: Children's Essentialist Beliefs About Heart TransplantsCognitive Science 41 (6): 1694-1712. 2017.Psychological essentialism is a folk theory characterized by the belief that a causal internal essence or force gives rise to the common outward behaviors or attributes of a category's members. In two studies, we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-old children evidenced essentialist reasoning about heart transplants by asking them to predict whether trading hearts with an individual would cause them to take on the donor's attributes. Control conditions asked children to consider the effects of tr…Read more
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399Concepts, analysis, generics and the canberra planPhilosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 113-171. 2012.
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29Speaking of Kinds: How Correcting Generic Statements can Shape Children's ConceptsCognitive Science 46 (12). 2022.Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes”) leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Cor…Read more
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99Moderately Insensitive SemanticsIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-sensitivity and semantic minimalism: new essays on semantics and pragmatics, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 133--168. 2007.
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154Generics, generalism, and reflective equilibrium: Implications for moral theorizing from the study of languagePhilosophical Perspectives 27 (1): 366-403. 2013.
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866What a Loaded Generalization: Generics and Social CognitionPhilosophy Compass 10 (9): 625-635. 2015.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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75Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to CategoriesCognitive Science 39 (5): 1021-1046. 2015.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 ca…Read more
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35Current Controversies in Philosophy of Cognitive Science (edited book)Routledge. 2020.Cognitive science poses a variety of philosophical questions. In this forthcoming volume, leading researchers debate five core questions in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science: Is Universal Grammar required to explain our linguistic capacities? Are some of our concepts innate or are they all learned? What role do our bodies play in cognition? Can neuroscience help us understand the mind? Can cognitive science help us understand human morality? The volume contains two accessible essays on each to…Read more
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1053The Mark of the Plural: Generic Generalizations and RaceIn Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, Routledge. pp. 277-289. 2017.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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368“Hillary Clinton is the Only Man in the Obama Administration”: Dual Character Concepts, Generics, and GenderAnalytic Philosophy 56 (2): 111-141. 2015.
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70Inferences about Members of Kinds: The Generics HypothesisLanguage and Cognitive Processes 27 887-900. 2012.
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51Redemption and the Sacred Subject: Themes from WagnerIn A. Hamilton & N. Zangwill (eds.), Scruton's Aesthetics, . forthcoming.
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181Conceptual distinctions amongst genericsCognition 126 (3): 405-422. 2013.Generic sentences (e.g., bare plural sentences such as “dogs have four legs” and “mosquitoes carry malaria”) are used to talk about kinds of things. Three experiments investigated the conceptual foundations of generics as well as claims within the formal semantic approaches to generics concerning the roles of prevalence, cue validity and normalcy in licensing generics. Two classes of generic sentences that pose challenges to both the conceptually based and formal semantic approaches to generics …Read more
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401Essence and natural kinds: When science meets preschooler intuitionOxford Studies in Epistemology 4 108-66. 2013.The present paper focuses on essentialism about natural kinds as a case study in order to illustrate this more general point. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously argued that natural kinds have essences, which are discovered by science, and which determine the extensions of our natural kind terms and concepts. This line of thought has been enormously influential in philosophy, and is often taken to have been established beyond doubt. The argument for the conclusion, however, makes critical use…Read more
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96Do Lions have Manes? For Children, Generics are about Kinds, not QuantitiesChild Development 83 423-433. 2012.
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80Quantified Statements are Recalled as Generics: Evidence from Preschool Children and AdultsCognitive Psychology 64 (186): 214. 2012.
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76All Ducks Lay Eggs: The Generic Overgeneralization EffectJournal of Memory and Language 65 15-31. 2011.
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983The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear Prejudice, and GeneralizationJournal of Philosophy 114 (8): 393-421. 2017.Generic generalizations such as ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus’ or ‘sharks attack bathers’ are often accepted by speakers despite the fact that very few members of the kinds in question have the predicated property. Previous work suggests that such low-prevalence generalizations may be accepted when the properties in question are dangerous, harmful, or appalling. This paper argues that the study of such generic generalizations sheds light on a particular class of prejudiced social beliefs…Read more
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75Cultural Transmission of Social EssentialismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (34): 13526-13531. 2012.
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113GenericsIn Gillian Russell & Delia Fara (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 355--366. 2012.
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48Do Ducks Lay Eggs? How People Interpret Generic AssertionsProceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. 2007.
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594Generics: Cognition and acquisitionPhilosophical Review 117 (1): 1-47. 2008.Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. However co…Read more
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53Conceptual and Linguistic Distinctions Between Singular and Plural GenericsProceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. 2009.
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |