Social kind generics and the dichotomizing perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACTGenerics about social kinds (or GSKs) frequently propagate descriptions that carry normative force (e.g., “women are emotional”). Some philosophers of language attribute this to GSKs’ tendency to transmit essentialist beliefs about social kinds. According to these accounts, utterances of GSKs implicate that there is something in the nature of social kinds that causes them to possess the properties described, and that individual members of these social kinds therefore ought to exhibit (or be expected to exhibit) these properties. Here, I draw on empirical evidence to suggest an alternative account. According to my framework, an utterance of a GSK implicates a distinction between the social kind described and its salient conceptual opposite, producing what I call a dichotomizing perspective. For example, “women are emotional” suggests that men are not. Importantly, such distinctions frequently persist in the societal common ground as a function of social power, in part due to their alignment with hierarchical social structures between dichotomized social kinds. This enables such GSKs to perpetuate biased patterns of attention, expectation, and behavior even in the absence of essentialist belief.KEYWORDS: Genericssocial kindspragmaticspsychological essentialismdichotomizing perspectivesocial structure AcknowledgementsThank you to Dan Weiskopf for the sustained support, insightful conversation, and many rounds of patient, thoughtful feedback. Thank you to Christie Hartley and Andrea Scarantino for the helpful comments and conversations about earlier drafts of the paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).