Rachel Sterken

• Michaelson, Eliot; Pepp, Jessica Alden & Sterken, Rachel (2025). On Amplification. In Connolly, Patrick Joseph; Goldberg, Sanford & Saul, Jennifer (Ed.), Conversations Online: Explorations in Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198872085. Full text in Research Archive
• Michaelson, Eliot; Pepp, Jessica Alden & Sterken, Rachel (2024). On Retweeting. In Lepore, Ernie & Anderson, Luvell (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780192844118. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192844118.013.49. Full text in Research Archive
• Hoicka, Elena; Saul, Jennifer; Prouten, Eloise; Whitehead, Laura & Sterken, Rachel (2021). Language Signaling High Proportions and Generics Lead to Generalizing, but Not Essentializing, for Novel Social Kinds. Cognitive Science. ISSN 0364-0213. 45(11), p. 1–29. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13051. Full text in Research Archive
• Pepp, Jessica Alden; Michaelson, Eliot & Sterken, Rachel (2019). Why we should keep talking about fake news. Inquiry (Oslo). ISSN 0020-174X. p. 1–17. doi: 10.1080/0020174X.2019.1685231. Full text in Research Archive
• Sterken, Rachel; Michaelson, Eliot & Pepp, Jessica Alden (2019). What's New About Fake News? Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. 16(2), p. 67–94. doi: 10.26556/jesp.v16i2.629. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings.

• Sterken, Rachel (2019). Linguistic Interventions and Transformative Communicative Disruption. In Burgess, Alexis; Cappelen, Herman Wright & Plunkett, David (Ed.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198801856. p. 417–434. Full text in Research Archive
• Sterken, Rachel (2018). The structures of social structural explanation: Comments on haslanger's what is (social) structural explanation? Disputatio. ISSN 0873-626X. 10(50), p. 173–199. doi: 10.2478/disp-2018-0012. Full text in Research Archive
• Sterken, Rachel (2017). The meaning of generics. Philosophy Compass. 12(8). doi: 10.1111/phc3.12431. Full text in Research Archive
• Sterken, Rachel (2016). Generics, Covert Structure and Logical Form. Mind & Language. ISSN 0268-1064. 31(5), p. 503–529. doi: 10.1111/mila.12118. Full text in Research Archive
• Sterken, Rachel (2015). Generics, Content and Cognitive Bias. Analytic Philosophy. ISSN 2153-9596. 56(1), p. 75–93. doi: 10.1111/phib.12056. Full text in Research Archive
• Sterken, Rachel (2015). Generics in context. Philosophers' Imprint. 15(21), p. 1–30. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper has two central goals. The first is to argue for the metaphysical thesis that there is no such phenomenon as genericity, i.e., to argue for a form of eliminativism about genericity. The second is to defend a novel theory of generic sentences on which the unpronounced quantifier expression Gen is an indexical. An important feature of the view is that much of what has appeared to be semantic work is moved into the metasemantics. Rather than create very complex semantic clauses (or construe other complex notions as constitutive of genericity), the proposal is that those complexities are best dealt with in a metasemantic theory. Many of the puzzles which plague theories of generics are treated as instances of more general puzzles having to do with metasemantics and implicit, context-sensitive communication. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0015.021

• Sterken, Rachel (2015). Leslie on Generics. Philosophical Studies. ISSN 0031-8116. 172(9), p. 2493–2512. doi: 10.1007/s11098-014-0429-2. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics (Leslie in Philos Perspect 21(1):375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117(1):1–47, 2008): (i) her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, (ii) the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and (iii) there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations. The final publication is available at link.springer.com via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0429-2

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• Sterken, Rachel (2016). Review: Bernhard Nickel's 'Between Logic and the World: An Integrated Theory of Generics'. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Full text in Research Archive
• Sterken, Rachel (2013). Generics in Context: Generalisation, Context and Communication. Universitetet i Oslo. Full text in Research Archive

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