The essentialist aspect of naive theories

Abstract

Recent work on children's inferences concerning biological and chemical categories has suggested that children (and perhaps adults) are essentialistsa view known as psychological essentialism. I distinguish three varieties of psychological essentialism and investigate the ways in which essentialism explains the inferences for which it is supposed to account. Essentialism succeeds in explaining the inferences, I argue, because it attributes to the child belief in causal laws connecting category membership and the possession of certain characteristic appearances and behavior. This suggests that the data will be equally well explained by a non-essentialist hypothesis that attributes belief in the appropriate causal laws to the child, but makes no claim as to whether or not the child represents essences. I provide several reasons to think that this non-essentialist hypothesis is in fact superior to any version of the essentialist hypothesis.

Feature integration in natural language concepts

“…In addition, it has been shown that people entertain essentialist beliefs about biological kinds (Gelman, 2003;Medin & Ortony, 1989). Two kinds of features have been proposed that could figure in such beliefs (Hampton et al, 2007;Strevens, 2000). On the one hand, people may believe that the "innards" of the organism are crucially important (Gelman & Wellman, 1991).…”

Metamorphosis: Essence, appearance, and behavior in the categorization of natural kinds

“…Assignment of an individual to a category may then depend on the degree to which the deep properties of the individual (and their functional relations) match those found in a typical category member. Also related to the causal homeostasis position is Strevens's (2000) minimalist hypothesis, according to which people believe that some shared thing causes the members of a certain kind to have their observable characteristics but that there is no need to posit that this shared thing should be an essence. It is sufficient to suppose that people assume that "being of the kind" causes the characteristics, without specifying whether that shared thing is an essence.…”

“…The naive notion of an essence for a biological kind can be assumed to involve several aspects (Gelman, 2003, pp. 10-11;Haslam, 1998;Rips, 2001;Strevens, 2000). The essence is something that an organism inherits from its parents and passes to its offspring; it is unchanging and indivisible; it is present in all members of the same type and only those members, resulting in sharp category boundaries; it is the primary cause of the common appearance, innards, and behavior of individuals of that type; and it justifies inductive projection of properties within the class.…”

Domain differences in the structure of artifactual and natural categories

“…In other words, the inference that the animal has the ZEBRA essence provides the best explanation of why it is horselike with black and white stripes. 2 To be sure, several different types of essences have been posited (Gelman & Hirschfeld, 1999; see also Marcus, 1971;Teller, 1975), and many different versions of psychological essentialism have been proposed (see, e.g., Strevens, 2000). Some researchers suggest that category essences are an all-or-none matter (e.g., Diesendruck & Gelman, 1999;Kalish, 1995Kalish, , 2002, and, therefore, essentialist categorization must be absolute.…”