Seeking Stable Generic Generalizations: Mission Impossible?
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Generic generalizations about natural and social kinds (e.g., “Raccoons have rabies”;
“Trader Joe’s cashiers are friendly”) and causal relationships (“Mutations in the
Gabrb1 gene promote alcohol consumption”) shape how agents learn, explain and intervene
on their environment. Yet, there’s no consensus about what underwrites people’s endorsement
of generic generalizations, and not enough is known about potential discrepancies
between children and adults’ interpretations and use of generic generalizations. This
talk brings together ideas from psychology, philosophy and linguistics to argue that
stability of the described relationship – the extent to which it holds across various
contexts, real or hypothetical – plays an important role in people’s endorsement of
generic generalizations about natural and social kinds, and about causal relationships
in these domains. The search for stability, however, needs to be reconciled with the
fact that categorical and causal regularities tend to have limiting conditions. In
a series of empirical studies with children and adults, we explore how agents navigate
the world composed of both broad and narrow patterns; how the search for robust non-accidental
regularities is flexibly adapted to handle “sociocultural bubbles” and other exceptions
to universality; how it informs everyday and expert communication; and finally, how
this capacity develops, and whether the developmental trajectory opens doors for cross-generational
miscommunication.
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