Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing a theory of the meaning of generics, since it takes speakers’ judgments at face value and ignores the non-semantic factors that might affect these judgments. Leslie’s theory therefore overfits the data of our linguistic intuitions. I present a reconceptualised version of the Psychological Theory of Generics as a theory of how heuristics affect our judgements of the truth values of generics and discuss the application of this reconceptualised theory to some of the puzzles posed by generics, including their apparent content-sensitivity, their inferential asymmetry and their association with stereotyping and prejudice.

泛型历来被证明很难使用形式语义工具进行分析。在本文中，我认为由 Sarah-Jane Leslie 提出的一个有影响力的泛型含义理论，即泛型心理学理论，最好不要解释为它们的含义理论，而是我们用来判断泛型是否真实的心理启发式理论。我认为 Leslie 的方法不太适合产生泛型含义的理论，因为它只从表面上接受说话者的判断，而忽略了可能影响这些判断的非语义因素。因此，莱斯利的理论过于拟合我们的语言直觉数据。我提出了泛型心理学理论的重新概念化版本，作为启发式如何影响我们对泛型真值的判断的理论，并讨论了这种重新概念化的理论在泛型提出的一些谜题中的应用，包括它们明显的内容敏感性、它们的推理不对称性以及它们与刻板印象和偏见的关联。