Abstract
Many generic sentences express stable inductive generalizations. Stable inductive generalizations are typically true for a causal reason. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is also the case for the generalizations expressed by generic sentences. More in particular, we discuss the possibility that many generic sentences of the form ‘ks have feature e’ are true because (members of) kind k have the causal power to ‘produce’ feature e. We will argue that such an analysis is quite close to a probabilistic based analysis of generic sentences according to which ‘relatively many’ ks have feature e, and that, in fact, this latter type of analysis can be ‘grounded’ in terms of causal powers. We will argue, moreover, that the causal power analysis is sometimes preferred to a correlation-based analysis, because it takes the causal structure that gives rise to the probabilistic data into account.
Highlights
Consider the following two causal claims:(1) a
Which of all these measures is best to account for ‘distinctiveness’ in terms of which the truth, or acceptability, of a generic sentence of the form ‘ks are e’ should be evaluated? And if ‘typicality’ doesn’t always reduce to ‘distinctiveness’, how should the former notion be defined? We are not sure whether there is a once-and-for-all answer to this question and Tessler and Goodman propose the likelihood function, while in van Rooij and Schulz we propose that typicality should be measured by a slight variant of Shep’s (1958) notion of ‘relative difference’, DÃÃPek 1⁄4 aPðaeÀjkðÞ1ÀÀða1ÞÀPaðÞePj:ðekjÞ:kÞ, with a 2 1⁄212 ; 1
It is by concentrating ourselves on probabilities that are stable under conditionalization by various conditions that generics like ‘Bees are sterile’, ‘Israeli live along the coast’ and ‘People are over three years old’ are predicted to be bad, or false, in each case the majority of the ‘kind’ has the relevant feature
Summary
It should be clear how examples like (4-a)–(4-c) can be accounted for on this proposal: (4-a) is true, or acceptable, because being striped is distinctive for tigers, whereas (4-b) is true because (i) more mosquitos than other types of insects carry the West Nile virus, and (ii) carrying this dangerous virus has a high impact. 10 The notion of stability is required to think of PðejkÞ À Pðej:kÞ as helping to account for inductive generalizations, and does the work that Cohen (1999) argues his condition of ‘homogeneity’ should do It is by concentrating ourselves on probabilities that are stable under conditionalization by various conditions that generics like ‘Bees are sterile’, ‘Israeli live along the coast’ and ‘People are over three years old’ are predicted to be bad, or false, in each case the majority of the ‘kind’ has the relevant feature.
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