The Harmful Feature of Generics

The Harmful Feature of Generics provides an in-depth investigation into the role of generics in essentialization offering a thorough examination of its roots. Generics, sentences expressing generalizations about categories or their members, are a common means to express stereotypes: we typically say "Philosophers are absent-minded" rather than "Some/Many/Most philosophers are absent-minded". The present book shows that this correlation is no coincidence. As emerged from robust empirical literature, generics seem to foster social essentialism, that is, they lead people to believe that the categories they are about possess an underlying essence. In doing so, generics dangerously contribute to stereotyping. But what enables generics to essentialize? The author untangles this puzzle thanks to an interdisciplinary approach encompassing philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. She draws on Haslanger's (2011, 2014) hypothesis that generics implicitly convey that the target category and predicated property are strongly connected. Rosola refines this proposal and substantiates it through the linguistic tests for implicatures and presuppositions, concluding that generics convey a generalized and particularized conversational implicatures which form the basis for essentialist beliefs.

The cover image was created by Photographer Andy Brown within the project The Image Speaks (2019), organized and funded by The University of Sheffield.