•  32
    My Heart Made Me Do It: Children's Essentialist Beliefs About Heart Transplants
    with Meredith Meyer, Susan A. Gelman, and Steven O. Roberts
    Cognitive 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
  •  193
    Essence, plenitude, and paradox
    Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1): 277-296. 2011.
  •  391
    Concepts, analysis, generics and the canberra plan
    Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 113-171. 2012.
  •  13
    Speaking of Kinds: How Correcting Generic Statements can Shape Children's Concepts
    with Emily Foster-Hanson and Marjorie Rhodes
    Cognitive 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
  •  822
    What a Loaded Generalization: Generics and Social Cognition
    Philosophy 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
  •  63
    Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to Categories
    with Shelbie L. Sutherland, Andrei Cimpian, and Susan A. Gelman
    Cognitive 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
  •  333
    Generics Oversimplified
    Noûs 49 (1): 28-54. 2015.
  •  27
    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
  •  99
    Generic Generalizations
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2016.
  •  1008
    The Mark of the Plural: Generic Generalizations and Race
    In 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.
  •  388
    Essence and natural kinds: When science meets preschooler intuition
    Oxford 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
  •  85
  •  265
  •  66
    All Ducks Lay Eggs: The Generic Overgeneralization Effect
    with Sangeet Khemlani and Sam Glucksberg
    Journal of Memory and Language 65 15-31. 2011.
  •  960
    The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear Prejudice, and Generalization
    Journal 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
  •  75
    Cultural Transmission of Social Essentialism
    with Marjorie Rhodes and Christina Tworek
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (34): 13526-13531. 2012.
  •  108
    Generics
    In Gillian Russell & Delia Fara (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 355--366. 2012.
  •  44
    Do Ducks Lay Eggs? How People Interpret Generic Assertions
    with Sangeet Khemlani, Sam Glucksberg, and Paula Rubio-Fernandez
    Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. 2007.
  •  571
    Generics: Cognition and acquisition
    Philosophical 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
  •  48
    Conceptual and Linguistic Distinctions Between Singular and Plural Generics
    with Sangeet Khemlani, Sandeep Prasada, and Sam Glucksberg
    Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. 2009.
  •  30
  •  35
    Syllogistic reasoning with generic premises: The generic overgeneralization effect
    with Sangeet Khemlani and Sam Glucksberg
    In B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. 2008.
  •  92
    Generics Articulate Default Generalizations
    Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 41 25-45. 2012.
  •  105
    Generics, Prevalence, and Default Inferences
    with Sangeet Khemlani and Sam Glucksberg
    Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society 443--8. 2009.
  •  123
    Higginbotham argues that conditionals embedded under quantifiers constitute a counterexample to the thesis that natural language is semantically compositional. More recently, Higginbotham and von Fintel and Iatridou have suggested that compositionality can be upheld, but only if we assume the validity of the principle of Conditional Excluded Middle. I argue that these authors’ proposals deliver unsatisfactory results for conditionals that, at least intuitively, do not appear to obey Conditional …Read more
  •  103
    Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and India
    with Meredith Meyer, Susan A. Gelman, and Sarah M. Stilwell
    Cognitive Science 37 (1): 668-710. 2013.
    Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denyi…Read more