Sarah-Jane Leslie

Sarah-Jane Leslie is the Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University,^[1] where she is also the Acting Director of the Program in Linguistics,^[2] and affiliated faculty in the Department of Psychology,^[3] and the University Center for Human Values.^[4] She is known for her work on the cognitive underpinnings of generic generalizations, and the relationship between these generalizations and social cognition.^[5] She is the author of numerous articles in philosophy and psychology,^[6] and has published in journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),^[7] Cognitive Psychology,^[8] Cognition,^[9] Noûs,^[10] and Philosophical Review.^[11] Leslie's work has been discussed by several media outlets, including NPR,^[12] ScienceDaily,^[13] and The Huffington Post.^[14]

Education and career

In 1998 Leslie entered Rutgers University as an undergraduate majoring in cognitive science, mathematics and philosophy. She graduated in 2002 summa cum laude.^[6] She received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2007 from Princeton University and was subsequently appointed as Assistant Professor to the philosophy faculty that same year. In 2013, at the age of 32, she was awarded tenure and promoted to Full Professor, skipping the position of Associate Professor.^[15] In 2014, she was named Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy.^[16]

Leslie holds several administrative, professional and service positions at Princeton University including Director of Graduate Student Placement in the philosophy department, where she works to assist graduate students through the process of applying for academic jobs.^[17] She was Faculty Fellow at Rockefeller College from 2012 to 2015.^[6] She is Chair of the Faculty Board for the organization Minorities and Philosophy (MAP), which aims to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in philosophy, including women and racial/ethnic minorities.^[18] Leslie is also a member of the Executive Committee for the Society for Philosophy and Psychology,^[19] and serves on numerous committees at Princeton University, including the Advisory Committee on Faculty Diversity.^[6] She is currently Acting Director of Princeton's Program in Linguistics.^[2]

In 2013, Leslie recorded a series of videos titled Philosophical Conversations, in which she interviewed several prominent philosophers including Rae Langton, Roger Scruton, Joshua Knobe and Kwame Anthony Appiah. The series was sponsored by the Marc Sanders Foundation and made available free to promote excellence in philosophy.^[20]

Research areas

Leslie's main research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. Much of her work has focused on generic generalizations, which are articulated in language via sentences such as “tigers are striped”, “a duck lays eggs”, “mosquitoes carry West Nile virus”.^[5] These sentences are difficult to analyze from the perspective of formal semantics, but are nonetheless easy for young children to acquire and process.^[21][22] These findings and others have led Leslie and her collaborators to hypothesize that generic sentences articulate cognitively fundamental, default generalizations – that is, the judgments formed by our cognitive systems' most basic way of generalizing information about kinds and categories.^[11][21]

Leslie's work has shown important connections between generic generalizations and social cognition.^[23] For example, she and NYU psychologist Marjorie Rhodes—along with Rhodes' student Christina Tworek—found that when preschool-aged children hear a novel social group described with generic language, they come to think of the group in essentialist terms—that is, as marking deep, important, and inherent distinctions amongst people. Further, they found that when parents themselves hold such beliefs about a social group, they tend to produce more generic language when describing the group to their children.^[7] Thus, generic language may be an important and powerful mechanism by which social essentialist beliefs are implicitly communicated across generations.^[23] More generally, Leslie's work has pointed to multiple connections between generic generalizations and social essentialism, stereotyping, and prejudice.^[5][24][25]

Awards and fellowships

Leslie has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Class of 1943 Professorship in Philosophy,^[16] the Jacob T. Viner University Preceptorship,^[26] the Mrs. Giles Whiting Honorific Fellowship,^[27] and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.^[6] In collaboration with Dr. Marjorie Rhodes, she has been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation,^[28] and from the Institute of Human Development and Social Change.^[29] In 2014-2015, Leslie is to deliver the Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture at Oxford University.^[6] In 2015, Leslie was awarded the Stanton Prize by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

Family

Leslie's father, Alan Leslie, is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science^[30] at Rutgers University.

Selected publications

• “Generics and the Structure of the Mind”, (2007), Philosophical Perspectives, 21, 375-403.
• “Generics: Cognition and Acquisition”, (2008), Philosophical Review, 117(1), 1-47.
• Leslie, S. J., Khemlani, S., & Glucksberg, S. (2011). “All ducks lay eggs: The Generic Overgeneralization Effect.” Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 15-31.
• Rhodes, M., Leslie, S. J. & Tworek, C. (2012). “Cultural Transmission of Social Essentialism.: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 109(34), 13526-13531.
• Leslie, S. J., & Gelman, S. A. (2012). “Quantified statements are recalled as generics: Evidence from preschool children and adults.” Cognitive Psychology, 64, 186-214.
• “Essence and Natural Kinds: When Science Meets Preschooler Intuition” (2013), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 4, 108-166.
• “The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear, Prejudice and Generalization” (in press), The Journal of Philosophy.

References

External links

• Official website
• Sarah-Jane Leslie's channel on YouTube
• Philosophy Department, Princeton University