I am happy to announce that my paper on generic language "The Language of Generalization" has been accepted at Psych Review. A preprint is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.02926 1/8
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"Birds fly" is a true sentence even though penguins dont fly. "Birds lay eggs" is true while "Birds are female" is not, even though the same darn birds (females) have the property. "Jake mows his neighbor's lawn" doesn't mean Jake is out there night and day mowing 3/8
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Our basic idea is generics and habituals express that an event or property occur relatively often, where what counts as "often" depends upon one's prior expectations. We formalized by harnessing the tools of formal semantics and Bayesian models of cognition 4/8pic.twitter.com/ynPBDUtJU6
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We predicted that attested differences in judgments could be traced back to differences in prior knowledge, which indeed they could 5/8pic.twitter.com/OIqfSFONUc
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We tested the model empirically by having participants judge sentences as true or false, while also measuring prior knowledge in diverse case studies. The model matches human judgments with a high degree of quantitative accuracy 6/8pic.twitter.com/EWCx0CkNam
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It is a further demonstration that even the simplest utterances exhibit an extreme context-dependence that must be taken into account to understand their meaning. It also shows the power of combining the tools of formal linguistics with computational models in psychology 7/8
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Finally, having a computational model of generic and habitual sentences allows us to quantitatively study how learning from language compares to other kinds of learning (e.g., observation, pedagogy) as well as understand how knowledge is acquired from language 8/8
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