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Introducing Olivier Lemeire

CEPDISC Visiting Researcher

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Olivier is a philosopher of science and language, funded as a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). He currently work at the Institute of Philosophy of KU Leuven in Belgium, and has previously been a visiting fellow at both Harvard University and Sheffield University.

During his visit, he will focus on developing an account of the way in which generic language may facilitate prejudice and discrimination. According to several philosophers, the use of generic generalizations to describe social groups (e.g., “Muslims are terrorists”/“Men are strong”) is closely intertwined with a variety of cognitive biases with harmful consequences (e.g., the overestimation of dangerous properties/ the is-ought fallacy). The question remains, however, how exactly the meaning of generic sentences about social groups is related to this biased reasoning.