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

Education and Career
As an undergraduate, Leslie studied at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. In 2002, she graduated summa cum laude with a triple major in philosophy, mathematics, and cognitive science. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2007 from Princeton University, where she was hired directly to the philosophy faculty as an Assistant Professor in the same year. In 2013, at the age of 32, she was awarded tenure and promoted directly to the rank of Full Professor, skipping the rank of Associate Professor entirely. One year later, she was named the Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy.

In addition to her academic research, Leslie is engaged in a wide range of other professional activities. For example, in 2013 she took on the role of interviewer for a video series entitled Philosophical Conversations, sponsored by the Marc Sanders Foundation. The goal of the interview series is to make free and accessible interviews with leading philosophers available to anyone interested in learning more about philosophy. Leslie is Director of Graduate Student Placement in her department, meaning that she guides graduate students through the process of applying to academic jobs, and she is a Faculty Fellow at Rockefeller College. 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. Leslie is also a member of the Executive Committee for the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and serves on numerous committees at Princeton University, including the Advisory Committee on Faculty Diversity. She is currently Acting Director of Princeton’s Program in Linguistics.

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”. These sentences are difficult to analyze from the perspective of formal semantics, but are nonetheless easy for young children to acquire and process. 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.

Leslie’s work has shown important connections between generic generalizations and social cognition. 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. Thus, generic language may be an important and powerful mechanism by which social essentialist beliefs are implicitly communicated across generations. More generally, Leslie’s work has pointed to multiple connections between generic generalizations and social essentialism, stereotyping, and prejudice.

Awards and Fellowships
Leslie has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Class of 1943 Professorship in Philosophy, the Jacob T. Viner University Preceptorship, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Honorific Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. In collaboration with Dr. Marjorie Rhodes, she has been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, and from the Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

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.