In What Sense are Generics Normative?

Suppose you see a teacher speaking to a student in an insulting or degrading way. You might go up to the teacher and say: “What are you doing? That’s not what a teacher does when students are having trouble.” And then you might say:

• A teacher tries to help her students.

Here you are using a special type of sentence called a generic. Moreover, you are using this sentence in a way that is normative. That is, you aren’t just saying that teachers generally tend to help their students; you seem to be saying that helping one student is a way of fulfilling some kind of ideal.

The specific sort of normative claim you are making here is a puzzling one, and I don’t feel like I completely understand it. To begin with, it’s clearly not just a claim about what someone should do. For example, it’s not just the claim: teachers should help their students. Instead, it seems to mean something more like: helping one’s students is what follows from the characteristic ideals of being a teacher.

To see this, imagine that you see a teacher listening to Coldplay. You are outraged because you believe that teachers should have better taste in music. In such a case, you could not express the thought you are thinking by saying: “A teacher has good taste in music.” The reason is that even if you think that teachers should have good taste in music, you presumably do not think that this is something that follows from the characteristic ideals of being a teacher.

Okay then, what do we even mean when we speak of the “characteristic ideals” of a particular kind of thing? Unfortunately, I don’t know. I wish I could say something more helpful about this, but I don’t feel like I have a good handle on it yet.

Instead, I just want to suggest that this somewhat mysterious kind of normativity is really a big deal, i.e., that all sorts of different questions we face in understanding people’s ordinary cognition boil down to understanding this kind of normativity, meaning that if we could understand it, we would be able to understand all sorts of different aspects of the way people think.

In people’s ordinary way of thinking about things, people don’t seem to be concerned only about what you should do. They also seem to be very concerned about what follows from certain sorts of characteristic ideals. People have a notion of the characteristic ideals of being a teacher, the characteristic ideals of being a scientist, the characteristic ideals of being a Christian. Then they also have a way of thinking about the characteristic ideals of certain sorts of situations and certain sorts of objects. These notions seem to be right at the heart of people’s ordinary way of making sense of the world.

Just as a first step down this road, consider sentences like:

• That’s not how one behaves at a Jewish wedding.

Or, more colloquially:

• That’s not how you behave at a Jewish wedding.

Sentences like these seem to express something pretty fundamental about how people ordinarily understand the behavior that is called for in certain situations. We have a sense that it is sometimes possible to identify a certain behavior that is just “what one does” in a particular type of situation. This notion seems to be normative in some important sense, but how should that normativity be understood?

James Kirkpatrick and I have argued that they are normative in the same hard-to-capture sense that generics are normative. What do we mean when we say that something is “what you do at a Jewish wedding”? We don’t just mean something like: when someone is at a Jewish wedding, she should do this thing. Rather, we are saying something more like: doing this is a way of conforming to the characteristic ideals that follow from being at a Jewish wedding. (For example, you might think that the best thing to do if you are at a Jewish wedding is to ignore all the proceedings and start thinking instead about some profound philosophical question – but this has nothing to do with the characteristic ideal of Jewish weddings per se, and you could not speak about it using this specific type of sentence.)

Now consider the traditional philosophical question regarding knowledge attributions like:

• Rachel knows how to behave at a Jewish wedding.

This sentence also seems to be saying something normative. It isn’t just saying that Rachel knows something that would be a way of behaving at a Jewish wedding; it seems to be saying that Rachel knows that “right” way of behaving, or the way of behaving that conforms to certain ideals. But which ideals? An obvious hypothesis would be: the exact same ideal we discussed in the previous paragraph. That is, the sentence means something at least broadly like: Rachel knows a way of behaving that conforms to the characteristic ideals that follow from being an action performed at a Jewish wedding.

Finally, consider judgments about persistence over time. Suppose that today we form a club for discussing recent experiments and call it the “Experiment Discussion Club.” Over the course of many years, certain features of the original club are lost but others are retained. Now suppose someone looks at the thing that exists ten years from now and says:

• Ultimately, this isn’t even the Experiment Discussion Club anymore.

How do people decide whether this sentence is true or false?

In a series of amazing papers, Kevin Tobia finds experimental evidence that intuitions about persistence over time in cases like these depend on something normative. Basically, people’s intuitions depend on whether the changes involve the object getting better vs. worse. People will be especially inclined to say that the club isn’t even the Experiment Discussion Club anymore if it gets a lot worse, whereas if the club changes by getting a whole lot better, people will say that it is still the Experiment Discussion Club – just a more awesome version of that club.

But better in which specific sense? It certainly doesn’t seem that it is just a matter of getting better in any old way. For example, suppose people in the club stopped doing experiments entirely and instead focused on fighting for human rights. You might think that this would make the club better, but it would not make the club better at being the Experiment Discussion Club. It seems that it is not just a matter of being better but rather a matter of being better at embodying the specific ideals that are characteristic of the object itself.