The Standard Argument 139

The Standard Argument 139
the concept X but the X stereotype.14 A stereotypic X is always a better
instance of the X stereotype than it is of X; that is a truism.15
Interesting Digression
The classic example of this sort of worry is the puzzle in psycholinguistics
about ‘Motherese’. It appears that mothers go out of their way to talk to
children in stereotypic sentences of their native language; in the case of
English, relatively short sentences with NVN structure (and/or Agent
Action Object structure; see Chapter 3). The child is thereby provided with
a good sample of stereotypic English sentences, from which, however, he
extracts not (anyhow, not only) the concept STEREOTYPIC ENGLISH
SENTENCE, but the concept ENGLISH SENTENCE TOUT COURT.
But why on Earth does he do that? Why doesn’t he instead come to believe
that the grammar of English is S ® NVN, or some fairly simple
elaboration thereof, taking such apparent counter-examples as he may
encounter as not well-formed? Remember, on the one hand, that Mother
is following a strategy of screening him from utterances of unstereotypic
sentences; and, on the other hand, that he’ll hear lots of counter-examples
to whatever grammar he tries out, since people say lots of ungrammatical
things. I think the answer must be that it’s a law about our kinds of minds
that they are set up to make inductions from samples consisting largely of
stereotypic English sentences to the concept ENGLISH SENTENCE (viz.
the concept sentences satisfy in virtue of being well-formed relative to the
grammar of English) and not from samples consisting largely of
stereotypic English sentences to the concept STEREOTYPIC ENGLISH
SENTENCE (viz. the concept sentences satisfy in virtue of being NVN).
In short, I do think there’s good reason for cognitive scientists to be
unhappy about the current status of theorizing about stereotypes. The
kinds of worries about compositionality that Chapter 5 reviewed show
that the relation a stereotype bears to the corresponding concept can’t be
constitutive. The standard alternative proposal is that it is simply heuristic;
e.g. that stereotypes are databases for fast recognition procedures. But this
seems not to account for the ubiquity and robustness of stereotype
phenomena; and, anyhow, it begs the sort of question that we just
discussed: why is it the concept X rather than the concept STEREOTYPIC
X that one normally gets from experience with stereotypic Xs? (Mutatis
mutandis, if the way perception works is that you subsume things under
14 Reminder: ‘the X stereotype’ is rigid. See n. 12 above.
15 Except in the (presumably never encountered) case where all the Xs are stereotypic.
In that case, there’s a dead heat.