FriSem

David Rose, Graduate Student in the Department of Psychology

Title:  Teleology and Generics

Abstract:  I'll share some recent work on teleology and generics that I have been doing with Siying Zhang, Qi Han and Tobi Gerstenberg. We investigate whether the type of property predicated in a generic statement matters for categorization. In two experiments, one involving transformation and one involving induction, we find that teleological properties carry more weight than either biological, behavioral or social properties. We are especially interested in getting feedback on these experiments and discussing next steps.