In English, you can say “men do x” or “women do y” without a built in obligation to indicate or to notice to yourself whether you mean all, all that you’ve noticed, all inevitably, most, or some. I think not having a requirement to be clear about such things leads to a lot of stereotyping and pontificating.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of language. In Italian it’s extremely rare to use a noun without an article as the subject of a sentence—you’d use the definite article (lit. ‘the men’) if you mean something like ‘typical men’ (as in ‘men have opposable thumbs’—male amputees do exist but are irrelevant to the point being made) and a ‘partitive article’ (or an indefinite pronoun such as ‘someone’, rewording the sentence such as ‘there are men who’, etc.) when you mean ‘certain men’—and yet people use the former all the time even when they have very little evidence that something applies to an entire reference class except a few irrelevant exceptions.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of language. In Italian it’s extremely rare to use a noun without an article as the subject of a sentence—you’d use the definite article (lit. ‘the men’) if you mean something like ‘typical men’ (as in ‘men have opposable thumbs’—male amputees do exist but are irrelevant to the point being made) and a ‘partitive article’ (or an indefinite pronoun such as ‘someone’, rewording the sentence such as ‘there are men who’, etc.) when you mean ‘certain men’—and yet people use the former all the time even when they have very little evidence that something applies to an entire reference class except a few irrelevant exceptions.
Thanks. That’s a good example of mental defaults pulling in one direction even though the language is pulling in the opposite direction.