Generics favor stability

Humans seek to predict, explain, and control their environments. Generalizations—like those expressed by “children like candy” and “cigarettes cause cancer”—provide one resource to facilitate these tasks. We develop a proposal tying the acceptability judgments of generics to the psychological functions of generalizations. We argue that the notion of stability and a recognition of the varied scope of regularities provide resources for a unified account of an apparently diverse range of generics: causal and categorical, essentialist and structural. This unifying account coheres with the function of generalization in human psychology, and provides a new framework ripe for further investigation.