The Language of Generalization

Understand

Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke").

• Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is philosophically puzzling and has resisted precise formalization.
• Here, we propose the first formal account of generalizations conveyed with language that makes quantitative predictions about human understanding.
• We test our model in three diverse domains: generalizations about categories (generic language), events (habitual language), and causes (causal language).