Abstract
Generic stereotypes are generically formulated generalizations that express a stereotype, like “Mexican immigrants are rapists” and “Muslims are terrorists.” Stereotypes like these are offensive and should not be asserted by anyone. Yet when someone does assert a sentence like this in a conversation, it is surprisingly difficult to successfully rebut it. The meaning of generic sentences is such that they can be true in several different ways. As a result, a speaker who is challenged after asserting a generic stereotype can often simply dismiss the objection and maintain that the stereotype is true in a way that is compatible with the challenger’s objection. In this paper, a semantic theory for generics is presented that accounts for this type of defensive shifting in upholding generic stereotypes. This theory is then used to develop two strategies to object more efficiently. The first strategy is to immediately deny that either of the two possible ways in which a generic can be true obtains. The second strategy is to deny the satisfaction of an additional condition that is necessary for a generic sentence to be true.
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Notes
The majority of journalists interpreted ‘they’ as referring to Mexican immigrants. Trump himself later clarified that he intended to refer to undocumented Mexican immigrants. Here, I will stick to the formulation that most fact-checkers aimed to refute, according to which ‘they’ referred to all Mexican immigrants. See for example Lee (2015) in The Washington Post.
Stereotypes are not defined here as being false nor as necessarily predicating a negative property. A stereotype, as the term is used here, is simply a widely held generalization about a social group. For some background on these definitional issues, see for example Whitley and Kite (2010).
Nickel’s account is actually more complex. Although the mechanistic condition presented here is supposed to account for the truth of generics, it is not the semantic truth-condition of generics, strictly speaking. For Nickel, the semantic content of a generic of the form “Ks are F” is that there is a normal way for members of the kind to be with respect to a determinable of F, such that all members of the kind which are normal in that way instantiate F. A way of being normal, on Nickel’s view, corresponds to a contextually suitable mechanism that explains why some members of the kind K instantiate F. Hence, ultimately, a generic is true if a contextually suitable mechanism exists that explains why some members of K instantiate F (Nickel 2008, 2016).
Furthermore, other generics are true even when no mechanism can explain why members of the kind instantiate the predicated property. This is the case for the statement that, for instance, “Up quarks have a spin of ½”. There is no known mechanism that explains why fundamental particles have the basic properties that they do.
Even with this addition, I am leaving out many important details. Here I can only mention that the domain of the generalization is not restricted to actual members of the kind, according to Cohen, but includes the members of the kind in uniform worlds, where these are worlds that “share the history of the actual world up to the reference time. But from this point on, no significant change occurs” (Cohen 2012, p. 76).
To be clear, Cohen himself never claims that this probabilistic condition is a necessary one. He presents an additional ‘relative’ probabilistic condition for generics (Cohen 1996) and also argues that bare plural generics are structurally ambiguous between a probabilistic reading and a rules-and-regulations reading (Cohen 2001).
Elsewhere I have argued that generics can actually be true based on three different generic relations, including a functional-explanatory relation. Since this functional-explanatory relation is obviously not applicable to generic stereotypes like (1–3), I do not discuss this condition here. However, this functional relation would be relevant when aiming to falsify generic stereotypes like “Women are submissive” and “Boys don’t cry” that can also be interpreted as true based on a functional relation between the kind and property. The two strategies outlined in this paper for responding to generic stereotypes can be easily extended to cover these types of stereotypes as well.
Elsewhere, however, I have argued that an indeterminacy theory is superior to a semantic ambiguity theory as well as to a contextualist theory. For an initial argument against an ambiguity theory, consider that if generic stereotypes were semantically ambiguous, one would expect that a conjunction of two opposing generics could also be read in a non-contradictory manner. But, “Muslims are terrorists, though Muslims aren’t terrorists” can only be read as contradictory (for a similar argument, see Sterken 2015b). For an initial argument against a contextualist view, consider that not all generalizations about Muslims are offensive. For instance, a generalization like “Some actual Muslims are terrorists” is not offensive. Yet, when asked the question, “What is a property that some actual Muslims have?” the response, “Muslims are terrorists” is still offensive. This is evidence for the fact that this response does not just express the generalization that “Some actual Muslims are terrorists.” If the generalization expressed by a generic sentence were truly context-dependent, however, this answer-to-question context would seem to select precisely for this existential meaning of the sentence.
See Greenberg (2003) for a further development of this idea.
This first majority condition is inspired by Cohen’s probabilistic condition, which is outlined in the first section. Note, however, that there is no restriction to members of the kind who instantiate either the predicated property or an alternative. There is no need to introduce such a restriction to account for minority generics since minority generics are, instead, true by virtue of the second, explanatory, relation.
This causal-explanatory relation can be considered a specification of Nickel’s condition as outlined in the first section. It is more specific in the sense that a suitable causal mechanism can only be one that is initiated by the defining property of the kind itself.
For evidence that people judge “by virtue of” paraphrases apt for type 1 generics but less so for type 2 generics, see Prasada and Dillingham (2006). It is not, however, because one agrees to this paraphrase that one also judges a generic to be true based specifically on a causal-explanatory relation. Elsewhere I have argued that a generic can also be true based on a functional-explanatory relation, as in “Bus drivers transport passengers” or “Hearts pump blood.” When a generic is judged to be true based on a functional-explanatory relation, one would also agree to an ‘in virtue of’ paraphrase.
Being part of a complete causal explanation requires that the instantiation of the defining property be a causal difference-maker for the instantiation of the generalized property. It falls outside of the scope of this paper to commit to whether causal difference-making is a probabilistic, counterfactual or manipulationist notion.
Matters are more complex, of course, since what I call ‘defining properties’ can also be sets or clusters of properties.
If one disagrees with this generic, it is presumably because one believes that it is not sharks’ nature that causes them to attack bathers, but rather the fact that they sometimes mistake bathers for their natural prey. The truth-conditions for generics presented here explain why this would lead one to consider the generic to be false.
The distinctiveness of a property is also not sufficient for a generic to be true on the current account. Elsewhere, Cohen (1996) argued that a generic can be true based on the fact that the predicated property is relatively more likely to be instantiated by members of the kind than by members of an alternative kind. Leslie (2007) has already shown, convincingly to my mind, that this relative condition is too weak and would over-generate true generics, like “Humans are blind” or “Humans are one-legged.” The causal condition presented here is stricter than Cohen’s relative condition and hence would rule out examples like these. However, it does capture the intuition that a property being distinctive of a kind often coincides with the truth of a generic.
The fact that this rebuttal appears successful is itself an additional argument in favor of the truth-conditions for generics presented above. In this way the rebuttal data are theoretically useful in eliciting further intuitions about the truth-conditions of generics (thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out).
Thus, this additional constraint does not cause “Frenchmen eat horsemeat” to be false. This generic is true based on a generic causal-explanatory relation. And, although being French might also cause French people to eat other specific things, these do not constitute incompatible alternatives.
As has been hypothesized, it is because humans are a competitive species that being left-handed confers some evolutionary fitness. Because humans are also cooperative, however, it also pays for the majority to be right-handed.
It also explains why other generic sentences like “Books are paperbacks” or “Mammals are placental mammals” are infelicitous. To determine whether the constraint outlined in this section is satisfied for a generic of the form “Ks are F,” one must determine whether the defining property of K is causally responsible for F. When F is a sub-kind of K, however, this requires one to determine whether the kind-identifying property of K is causally responsible for a specification of that very property. This cannot be determined and hence generics that predicate sub-kinds are semantically uninterpretable. For what I believe is a similar view, see Nickel (2018).
Though speaking different languages is in principle not incompatible, it is de facto often incompatible. I believe this belief in the de facto exclusiveness of languages explains why (14) is judged to be false.
Hence, generics like “Lions give birth to live young” are true based on a generic causal relation and satisfy the additional constraint. Even though male lions do not give birth at all, not giving birth to live young is not a property that can be causally explained by the nature of the kind.
A response like this does accept, however, that the kind has a causal defining property. In some cases, as with stereotypes about race or gender, one may want to avoid this approach and hence only apply the first strategy.
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Lemeire, O. Falsifying generic stereotypes. Philos Stud 178, 2293–2312 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01555-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01555-3