Abstract
Is it harmful to make generic claims about social groups? Those who say yes cite the reinforcement of oppressive stereotypes and cognitive bias. Those who say no cite the potential of generics to do good, rather than harm, by taking advantage of the same mechanisms that perpetuate the harms. This paper analyzes generic utterances in the context of social justice efforts to weigh in on the debate about whether and how generic utterances contribute to stereotypes and oppression. We need to first pay more attention to what it means to utter generics in social justice contexts. Doing so will allow us to distinguish those generic utterances that are helpful for social justice projects from those that might impede their progress. I argue that there is an important pragmatic sense in which generics can be undermined: especially generics used in service of social justice claims. I then offer an epistemic thesis for why some generics are more susceptible to being undermined by counter-examples than others. I conclude that if we are interested in using generics in the service of social justice, then there is reason to restrict the contexts in which we utter generics. In doing so, I challenge the conventional wisdom that generics are resistant to counterexamples.
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Notes
This paper is theory-neutral about conversational frameworks and dynamics. A sentence’s ‘acceptance’ could mean, for example, acceptance into the common ground, addition to a scoreboard, or uptake of a speech act. For consistency’s sake, I will use common ground terminology.
Goldbeg, Jonah. 2002. ‘Why Feminists Aren’t Funny.’ National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/2002/06/why-feminists-arent-funny-jonah-goldberg/).
Katherine Ritchie (2019) phrases the worry in terms of racial and gender generics. Sarah-Jane Leslie focuses on “generics about groups of people” (2017, p. 399).
Haslanger 2014 presents a modification of this view.
For a notable exception, see Greenberg (2007).
See also Haslanger (2011) who discusses the importance of pragmatic features of generics more broadly.
See Langton (1995) on perlocutionary effects, and Camp 2013 on force and impact, for just a few examples.
I specify “consideration” here because I discuss cases of derailment and topic changing, which do not involve full or explicit blocking of a proposition from entering the common ground, but rather shift focus and attention away from those propositions, with the end result that they are sometimes no longer considered. Or, they might be in the common ground, but sufficiently backgrounded so as to become irrelevant.
This is orthogonal to but bears some similarity to discussions of pragmatic encroachment, where the stakes of knowing p are sufficiently raised so as to cast doubt on whether an individual knows that p (Stanley 2005).
Empirical work testing this claim is underway in joint work; preliminary results suggesting that counterexamples to generic claims like the ones in Sect. 2.2 decrease participants’ confidence in the generic.
Discursive injustice is another phenomenon whose description targets the undermining of speech capacities. Saray Ayala-Lopez (2018), drawing on Kukla (2014), describes the way certain conversational norms: “undermine[s] the speech capacity of (some) speakers, understood as… the capacity to do certain things with their words (illocutionary capacity)” (p. 728). Examples include: nobody engaging with your point, or a speaker’s claim not being taken for what it is. For Ayala-Lopez, this phenomenon is tied to social identity. I think that social identity plays a role in pragmatic undermining, but that pragmatic undermining can occur regardless of the social status of speaker and hearer.
For example, on my view, Rae Langton’s blocking is a form of pragmatic undermining. It doesn’t falsify, but it does stop utterances from being accepted into the common ground. Langton writes: “I want to look at blocking as a linguistic and political maneuver, preventing default accommodation and undermining force” (2017, p. 148).
In his discussion of generic stereotypes, Olivier Lemeire more explicitly discusses semantic undermining: a generic sentence “clearly cannot be falsified by simply providing evidence of some counterexamples. A sentence with the form “Ks are F” does not express a universal generalization and hence can be true even in the face of exceptions” (2021, p. 2294).
In ongoing joint work, participants in an experiment were presented with generics and counter-example pairs like (9) and (10) and were asked whether the counter-example utterer was intending the counterexample as a “yes, but…” or “no, because…” A significant portion of the respondents selected “no, because.”.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this interpretation.
See Langton 2018 and Ayala-Lopez 2018 on authority dynamics and undermining in conversation.
One might hypothesize that a felicitous reading of (10) come from an enthymematic reading: whereby (10) is a paraphrase of a more detailed statement that directly challenges the generic. Some enthymematic interpretations of Carl’s response could be: (a) “Maya was promoted last month, and this is not an anomaly.” (b) “Maya was promoted last month, and this company promotes women.” Or (c) “Maya was promoted last month, and any woman who works hard enough at this organization will get promoted too.” These are not so much direct challenges to the generic claim, so much as they might be challenges to an implicature of Maya’s generic sentence, or a challenge to her suggestion that her company has the same problem that women face overall. It could also be seen as a denial that her claim is relevant in the current context. A direct challenge might look like this: “Maya was promoted last month, and as far as I can tell, women are getting promoted pretty regularly, so I disagree that women are promoted at lower rates than men.” One interesting feature of filling in the enthymeme is that the more explicitly we get a rejection of the generic, the less credible (in my opinion) the unstated portions of the paraphrase are. This could be one reason why the paraphrased counterexample is more effective than its explicit counterpart. Thanks to an anonymous referee for inspiring this discussion.
See Muhammad (2010) for a critique of DuBoisian exceptionalism along similar lines.
I grant that some people would credit Obama’s success to his being Black, and that some people who utter counterexamples like (10) and (12) could do so harboring causal attitudes about affirmative action, but I think that model minority exceptionalism is different in that it attributes success to a specific minoritized status with appeal to intrinsic rather than extrinsic features.
The testimony in a 2018 Baltimore Sun op-ed about ‘male-bashing’ follows this pattern: “For the most part, the men I know lead quiet, productive lives; are concerned with the welfare of their families and treat others with respect, including women” (Medinger, 2018). See Herbert 2019 on the pragmatics of #metoo.
Ritchie (2019) addresses this: “Some have taken to using refrains like “all lives matter” and “not all men” as responses to campaigns to shed light on the pervasiveness of police violence and sexual harassment and assault. Attempting to describe systematic patterns of oppression with quantified statements… might bring these to mind, thereby undermining the aim of describing and working to rectify structural injustice” (p. 37). Ritchie’s point is that statements like ‘all lives matter’ and ‘not all men’ arise in response to quantified statements, which is another reason that using generics could be more strategic than using quantified statements to describe injustice and oppression. But I hope I have shown that they also arise in response to generics.
See Cherry 2017 and Clapp 2022 for histories and analyses of the rhetoric of “all lives matter.” Clapp gives a common ground analysis of how the pragmatics of “all lives matter” involves a willful misinterpretation of “Black lives matter” and in so doing blocks its acceptance into the common ground.
Further, the right-wing dog-whistles are not restricted to quantified statements; think of “Blue lives matter,” a pro-police slogan that also arose in response to the “Black lives matter” movement (Clayton 2018).
Intuitions vary more on these cases than the social justice cases presented in 2.2.
By efficacy I mean the kind of uptake and affirmation of the generic by groups and individuals who were otherwise and previously uninvolved with efforts to resist anti-Black racism. See Taylor 2016 and Lebron (2017) for a detailed history of the Movement for Black Lives, Cherry 2021 for a discussion of uptake and the appearances of uptake, and Clapp (2022) for linguistic and pragmatic analyses of “Black Lives Matter.”.
See Marx et al. (2009) for experimental evidence of the benefits of the salience of Obama’s success: “When Obama’s stereotype-defying accomplishments garnered national attention—just after his convention speech, and election to the presidency—they had a profound beneficial effect on Black-Americans’ exam performance, such that the negative effects of stereotype threat were dramatically reduced” (p. 953).
This kind of view is defended by Sarah-Jane Leslie (2015) and Patrick O’Donnell (2017). While Leslie provides a separate semantics for normative generics, O’Donnell gives a semantics for ‘generics about racial kinds’ (generics about race that need not be social), of which (7) is an instance. Ritchie (2019) also characterizes (7) as a racial generic.
See Almotahari 2022 for a discussion of how striking property generics — what he calls ‘Type B generics’ — are importantly different from strong generalizations that can be paraphrased as “generally, typically, or almost always [Fs are G]” (p. 405). This section of my paper focuses on these stronger generics, which are typically thought to be resistant to counterexample. Section 3 discusses striking property generics in more detail.
Thanks to Zoe Johnson King and Gabe Greenberg for inspiring this discussion. See Kukla (2014) for the way in which audiences can change a speaker’s speech act in a similar way. Future work will investigate the conversational move of changing the question under discussion, of which this may be an instance.
See Haslanger (2011) for a similar Althusser-inspired account of ideology.
I am indebted to Henry Schiller and Michael Barnes for this discussion.
Michael Warner (2002) calls loci of such sub-cultures counterpublics.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful conversations and feedback, I am grateful to Matthew Adler, Derek Anderson, Louise Antony, Lauren Ashwell, Sonu Bedi, Maren Behrensen, Sam Berstler, Susan Brison, Hsiang-Yun Chen, Aaron Garrett, Gabe Greenberg, Sally Haslanger, Cansu Hepçağlayan, Sukaina Hirji, Adam Hosein, Robin Jeshion, Zach Joachim, Zoë Johnson King, Joshua Knobe, Victor Kumar, Rose Lenehan, Genae Matthews, Michaela McSweeney, Mallory Medeiros, Daniel Mendez, Sumeet Patwardhan, Jonathan Phillips, David Plunkett, Kevin Reuter, Katherine Ritchie, Andrea Roman, Jennifer Saul, Naomi Scheman, Mark Schroeder, DeeAnn Spicer, Susanne Sreedhar, Daniel Star, W. Starr, Merve Tapinc, Briana Toole, Jonathan Vandenburgh, Lewis Wang, and audiences at Dartmouth College, Boston University, University of Southern California, and the University of Zurich.
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Hesni, S. Generics and social justice. Philos Stud 181, 109–132 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02064-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02064-9