Falsifying generic stereotypes
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Falsifying generic stereotypes Olivier Lemeire1
Accepted: 16 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
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. Keywords Generics Stereotypes Counter-speech Falsification Truthconditions Semantics Hate speech
& Olivier Lemeire [email protected] 1
Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science (CLPS), Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
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O. Lemeire
1 Introduction In 2015, then presidential candidate Donald Trump said in reference to Mexican immigrants that ‘‘They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.’’1 When harmful stereotypes like these are broadcast to millions, the press is obligated to respond. Most newspapers aimed to do so by publishing a factcheck of the sentence ‘‘Mexican immigrants are rapists.’’ Yet those who were tasked with checking the truth of this sentence faced a considerable challenge. After all, what exactly does this sentence mean and what evidence would suffice to determine its falsity? Upon reflection, this sentence clearly cannot be falsified by simply providing evidence of some counterexamples. A sentence with the form ‘‘Ks are F’’ does not express a universal generalization and hence can be true even in the face of exceptions. The more innocuous sentence ‘‘Ravens are black,’’ for instance, is true even though some ravens are, in fact, white. Trump himself recognized that there are exceptions to his stereotypical generalization since some Mexican immigrants— he assumed—are good people. Generalizations of the form ‘‘Ks are F’’ are called generics because they characterize a kind without explicitly specifying how many members of the kind instantiate the generalized property. It is rather common for stereotypes to be formulated as generics. This is partly because something about the meaning of generic sentences makes them difficult to fact-check and falsify. Consider t
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