•  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.
  •  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
  •  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
  •  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
  •  391
    Concepts, analysis, generics and the canberra plan
    Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 113-171. 2012.
  •  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
  •  333
    Generics Oversimplified
    Noûs 49 (1): 28-54. 2015.
  •  265
  •  193
    Essence, plenitude, and paradox
    Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1): 277-296. 2011.
  •  174
    Conceptual distinctions amongst generics
    with Sandeep Prasada, Sangeet Khemlani, and Sam Glucksberg
    Cognition 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
  •  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
  •  108
    Generics
    In Gillian Russell & Delia Fara (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 355--366. 2012.
  •  105
    Generics, Prevalence, and Default Inferences
    with Sangeet Khemlani and Sam Glucksberg
    Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society 443--8. 2009.
  •  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
  •  99
    Generic Generalizations
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2016.
  •  92
    Generics Articulate Default Generalizations
    Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 41 25-45. 2012.
  •  85
  •  75
    Cultural Transmission of Social Essentialism
    with Marjorie Rhodes and Christina Tworek
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (34): 13526-13531. 2012.
  •  66
    Inferences about Members of Kinds: The Generics Hypothesis
    with Sangeet Khemlani and Sam Glucksberg
    Language and Cognitive Processes 27 887-900. 2012.
  •  66
    All Ducks Lay Eggs: The Generic Overgeneralization Effect
    with Sangeet Khemlani and Sam Glucksberg
    Journal of Memory and Language 65 15-31. 2011.
  •  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
  •  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.
  •  47
    Redemption and the Sacred Subject: Themes from Wagner
    In A. Hamilton & N. Zangwill (eds.), Scruton's Aesthetics, . forthcoming.
  •  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.