35 found
Order:
  1. The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear Prejudice, and Generalization.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy 114 (8):393-421.
    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, and points to new ways in (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   128 citations  
  2. “Hillary Clinton is the Only Man in the Obama Administration”: Dual Character Concepts, Generics, and Gender.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2015 - Analytic Philosophy 56 (2):111-141.
  3. Generics and the structure of the mind.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2007 - Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1):375–403.
  4. Essence and natural kinds: When science meets preschooler intuition.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4:108-66.
    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 of intuitions, (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   47 citations  
  5. What a Loaded Generalization: Generics and Social Cognition.Daniel Wodak, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Marjorie Rhodes - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (9):625-635.
    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.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  6. Generic Generalizations.Sarah-Jane Leslie & Adam Lerner - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  7. Conceptual distinctions amongst generics.Sandeep Prasada, Sangeet Khemlani, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Sam Glucksberg - 2013 - Cognition 126 (3):405-422.
    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 were investigated. Striking property generics (e.g. “sharks (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  8. Carving up the Social World with Generics.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2014 - Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.
  9. Generics Oversimplified.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2015 - Noûs 49 (1):28-54.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  10. Cultural Transmission of Social Essentialism.Marjorie Rhodes, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Christina Tworek - 2012 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (34):13526-13531.
  11. Concepts, analysis, generics and the canberra plan.Mark Johnston & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):113-171.
  12.  84
    Quantified Statements are Recalled as Generics: Evidence from Preschool Children and Adults.Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan Gelman - 2012 - Cognitive Psychology 64 (186):214.
  13. Essence, plenitude, and paradox.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2011 - Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1):277-296.
  14.  82
    All Ducks Lay Eggs: The Generic Overgeneralization Effect.Sarah-Jane Leslie, Sangeet Khemlani & Sam Glucksberg - 2011 - Journal of Memory and Language 65:15-31.
  15.  36
    Speaking of Kinds: How Correcting Generic Statements can Shape Children's Concepts.Emily Foster-Hanson, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Marjorie Rhodes - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (12):e13223.
    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). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  16. Generics Articulate Default Generalizations.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2012 - Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 41:25-45.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  17.  46
    Women are underrepresented in fields where success is believed to require brilliance.Meredith Meyer, Andrei Cimpian & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
  18. Do Lions have Manes? For Children, Generics are about Kinds, not Quantities.Amanda Brandone, Andrei Cimpian, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan Gelman - 2012 - Child Development 83:423-433.
  19. The Mark of the Plural: Generic Generalizations and Race.Daniel Wodak & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2017 - In Paul Taylor, Linda Martin Alcoff & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race. Routledge. pp. 277-289.
    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.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  20. Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and India.Meredith Meyer, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Susan A. Gelman & Sarah M. Stilwell - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (1):668-710.
    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 denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  21.  33
    (2 other versions)Generics.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2008 - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  22. Generics, generalism, and reflective equilibrium: Implications for moral theorizing from the study of language.Adam Lerner & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2013 - Philosophical Perspectives 27 (1):366-403.
  23.  85
    Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to Categories.Shelbie L. Sutherland, Andrei Cimpian, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan A. Gelman - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (5):1021-1046.
    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 category generalizations would distract from the main goal (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  24.  57
    Conceptual and Linguistic Distinctions Between Singular and Plural Generics.Sarah-Jane Leslie, Sangeet Khemlani, Sandeep Prasada & Sam Glucksberg - 2009 - Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  25.  52
    Do Ducks Lay Eggs? How People Interpret Generic Assertions.Sangeet Khemlani, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Sam Glucksberg & Paula Rubio-Fernandez - 2007 - Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  26.  46
    My Heart Made Me Do It: Children's Essentialist Beliefs About Heart Transplants.Meredith Meyer, Susan A. Gelman, Steven O. Roberts & Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (6):1694-1712.
    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 trading money with an individual. Results (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  27.  72
    Inferences about Members of Kinds: The Generics Hypothesis.Sangeet Khemlani, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Sam Glucksberg - 2012 - Language and Cognitive Processes 27:887-900.
  28. 'If', 'Unless', and Quantification.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2008 - In Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values: Essays in Honor of Ernie Lepore. Springer.
    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 Excluded Middle. Further, there is no natural way to extend their accounts (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  29. Generics, Prevalence, and Default Inferences.Sangeet Khemlani, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Sam Glucksberg - 2009 - Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society:443--8.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  30. 'Real Men': Polysemy or Implicature?Sarah-Jane Leslie - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
  31.  45
    Current Controversies in Philosophy of Cognitive Science.Adam Lerner, Simon Cullen & Sarah-Jane Leslie (eds.) - 2020 - Routledge.
    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 topic, each advocating for an opposing (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32.  47
    Syllogistic reasoning with generic premises: The generic overgeneralization effect.Sangeet Khemlani, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Sam Glucksberg - 2008 - In B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  33. Essence and Natural Kinds: When Science Meets Preschooler Intuition1.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2013 - Oxford University Press.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34.  12
    (1 other version)Moderately Insensitive Semantics.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2007 - In G. Preyer (ed.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 133--168.
  35.  58
    Redemption and the Sacred Subject: Themes from Wagner.Sarah-Jane Leslie - 2012 - In Andy Hamilton & Nick Zangwill (eds.), Scruton's Aesthetics. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark