Generics, Prevalence, and Default Inferences

We examine the extent to which people’s judgments about whether a given member of a kind has a property are guided by prevalence estimates alone, or whether their acceptance of a generic generalization also impacts these judgments. Our data are not accounted for by prevalence estimates alone: acceptance of a generic disposes people to infer that, by default, a given member of a kind has the relevant property.

[1]  S. Gelman,et al.  The Essential Child : Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought , 2003 .

[2]  M. Morreau,et al.  What Some Generic Sentences Mean , 1995 .

[3]  S. Glucksberg,et al.  Syllogistic reasoning with generic premises: The generic overgeneralization effect , 2008 .

[4]  Stella Vosniadou,et al.  Similarity and analogical reasoning: Similarity and Analogical Reasoning , 1989 .

[5]  John McCarthy,et al.  Applications of Circumscription to Formalizing Common Sense Knowledge , 1987, NMR.

[6]  Sarah-Jane Leslie,et al.  Do ducks lay eggs? How people interpret generic assertions , 2007 .

[7]  Renée Elio,et al.  On Reasoning with Default Rules and Exceptions , 2001 .

[8]  Sarah-Jane Leslie,et al.  Generics: Cognition and Acquisition , 2008 .

[9]  Grigoris Antoniou,et al.  Nonmonotonic reasoning , 1997 .

[10]  Sandeep Prasada,et al.  Representation of Principled Connections: A Window Onto the Formal Aspect of Common Sense Conception , 2009, Cogn. Sci..

[11]  Nicholas Asher,et al.  Generics and Defaults , 1997, Handbook of Logic and Language.

[12]  Johan van Benthem,et al.  Handbook of Logic and Language , 1996 .

[13]  Sarah-Jane Leslie,et al.  GENERICS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND , 2007 .

[14]  Francis Jeffry Pelletier,et al.  The Generic book , 1997 .

[15]  R. Elio.  Human Benchmarks on AI ’ s Benchmark Problems , 1993 .

[16]  Sandeep Prasada,et al.  Principled and statistical connections in common sense conception , 2006, Cognition.