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92Moderately Sensitive SemanticsIn G. Preyer (ed.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics, Oxford University Press. pp. 133--168. 2007.
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37My 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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401Concepts, analysis, generics and the canberra planPhilosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 113-171. 2012.
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32Speaking 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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10Moderately Insensitive SemanticsIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-sensitivity and semantic minimalism: new essays on semantics and pragmatics, Oxford University Press. pp. 133--168. 2007.
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164Generics, generalism, and reflective equilibrium: Implications for moral theorizing from the study of languagePhilosophical Perspectives 27 (1): 366-403. 2013.
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908What 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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78Memory 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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38Current 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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1079The Mark of the Plural: Generic Generalizations and RaceIn Paul Taylor, Linda Martin 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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53Conceptual and Linguistic Distinctions Between Singular and Plural GenericsProceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. 2009.
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37Women are underrepresented in fields where success is believed to require brillianceFrontiers in Psychology 6. 2015.
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45Syllogistic reasoning with generic premises: The generic overgeneralization effectIn B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society., Cognitive Science Society. 2008.
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97Generics Articulate Default GeneralizationsRecherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 41 25-45. 2012.
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108Generics, Prevalence, and Default InferencesProceedings of the Cognitive Science Society 443--8. 2009.
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128'If', 'Unless', and QuantificationIn Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values: Essays in Honor of Ernie Lepore, Springer. 2008.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
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109Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and IndiaCognitive 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
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375“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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71Inferences about Members of Kinds: The Generics HypothesisLanguage and Cognitive Processes 27 887-900. 2012.
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55Redemption and the Sacred Subject: Themes from WagnerIn Andy Hamilton & Nick Zangwill (eds.), Scruton's Aesthetics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2012.
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191Conceptual 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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406Essence 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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106Do Lions have Manes? For Children, Generics are about Kinds, not QuantitiesChild Development 83 423-433. 2012.
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |