Essentialism

Psychological essentialism is any folk theory of concepts positing that members of a category have a property or attribute (essence) that determines their identity. Psychological essentialism is similar to varieties of philosophical essentialism, with roots extending back to ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. One important difference, however, is that psychological essentialism is a claim about human reasoning, and not a metaphysical claim about the structure of the real world. Psychological essentialism may be divided into three types: sortal, causal, and ideal (see Gelman and Hirschfeld in press).

The sortal essence is the set of defining characteristics that all and only members of a category share. This notion of essence is captured in Aristotle's (1924) distinction between essential and accidental properties (see also Keil's 1989 defining versus characteristic properties): the essential properties constitute the essence. For example, on this view the essence of a grandmother would be the property of being the mother of a person's parent (rather than the accidental or characteristic properties of wearing glasses and having gray hair). In effect, this characterization is a restatement of the classical view of concepts: meaning (or identity) is supplied by a set of necessary and sufficient features that determine whether an entity does or does not belong in a category (Smith and Medin 1981). Specific essentialist accounts then provide arguments concerning which sorts of features are essential. The viability of this account has been called into question by more recent models of concepts that stress the importance of probabilistic features, exemplars, and theories in concepts.

In contrast, the causal essence is the substance, power, quality, process, relationship, or entity that causes other category-typical properties to emerge and be sustained, and that confers identity. Locke (1894/1959: Book III, p. 26) describes it as "the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is. And thus the real internal, but generally . . . unknown constitution of things, whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence." The causal essence is used to explain the observable properties of category members. Whereas the sortal essence could apply to any entity, the causal essence applies only to entities for which inherent, hidden properties determine observable qualities. For example, the causal essence of water may be something like H₂O, which is responsible for various observable properties that water has. Thus, the cluster of properties "odorless, tasteless, and colorless" is not a causal essence of water, despite being true of all members of the category Water, because the properties have no direct causal force on other phenomenal properties of that kind.

Causal essentialism requires no specialized knowledge, and, in contrast to sortal essentialism, people may possess an "essence placeholder" without knowing what the essence is (Medin 1989; Medin and Ortony 1989). For example, a child might believe that girls have some inner, nonobvious quality that distinguishes them from boys and that is responsible for the many observable differences in appearance and behavior between boys and girls, before ever learning about chromosomes or human physiology.

The ideal essence is assumed to have no actual instantiation in the world. For example, on this view the essence of "goodness" is some pure, abstract quality that is imperfectly realized in real-world instances of people performing good deeds. None of these good deeds perfectly embodies "the good," but each reflects some aspect of it. Plato's cave allegory (The Republic), in which what we see of the world are mere shadows of what is real and true, exemplifies this view. The ideal essence thus contrasts with both the sortal and the causal essences. There are relatively little empirical data available on ideal essences in human reasoning (but see Barsalou 1985).

Most accounts of psychological essentialism focus on causal essences. Causal essentialism has important implications for category-based inductive inferences, judgments of constancy over time, and stereotyping. By two to three years of age, children expect category members to share nonobvious similarities, even in the face of salient perceptual dissimilarities. For example, on learning that an atypical exemplar is a member of a category (e.g., that a penguin is a bird), children and adults draw novel inferences from typical instances to the atypical member (Gelman and Markman 1986). By four years of age children judge nonvisible internal parts to be especially crucial to the identity and functioning of an item. Children also treat category membership as stable and unchanging over transformations such as costumes, growth, metamorphosis, or changing environmental conditions (Keil 1989; Gelman, Coley, and Gottfried 1994). The finding that young children hold essentialist beliefs thus suggests that human concepts are not constructed atomistically from perceptual features.

Causal essentialism is closely related to the notion of "kinds" or NATURAL KINDS (Schwartz 1977). Whereas a category is any grouping together of two or more discriminably different things, a kind is a category that is believed to be based in nature, discovered rather than invented, and capturing indefinitely many similarities. "Tigers" is a kind; the set of "striped things" (including tigers, striped shirts, and barbershop poles) is not, because it captures only a single, superficial property (stripedness); it does not capture nonobvious similarities, nor does it serve as a basis of induction (e.g., Mill 1843; Markman 1989). Similarly, the ad hoc category of "things to take on a camping trip" does not form a kind (Barsalou 1991). Whereas kinds are treated as having essences, other categories are not. It is not yet known which categories are construed as "kinds" over development. The majority of evidence for causal essentialism obtains from animal categories. However, similar beliefs seem to characterize how people construe social categories such as race, gender, and personality. These racial, gender, or personality "essences" may be analogical extensions from a folk biological notion, or an outgrowth of a more general "essentialist construal" (see Atran 1990; Carey 1995; Keil 1994; Pinker 1994 for discussion).

Essentialism is pervasive across history, and initial evidence suggests that it may be pervasive across cultures (Atran 1990). Whether biological taxa truly possess essences is a matter of much debate (Sober 1994; Mayr 1982; Kornblith 1993; Dupré 1993), although essentialism is largely believed to be incompatible with current biological knowledge. Some scholars have proposed that essentialist views of the species as fixed and unchanging may present obstacles for accurately learning scientific theories of EVOLUTION (Mayr 1982).

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-- Susan A. Gelman

References

Aristotle. (1924). Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Barsalou, L. W. (1985). Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of instantiation as determinants of graded structure in categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 11:629-654.

Barsalou, L. W. (1991). Deriving categories to achieve goals. In G. H. Bower, Ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1-64.

Carey, S. (1995). On the origins of causal understanding. In D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack, Eds., Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 268-308.

Dupré, J. (1993). The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gelman, S. A., J. D. Coley, and G. M. Gottfried. (1994). Essentialist beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories. In L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture., pp. 341-366. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gelman, S. A., and L. A. Hirschfeld. How biological is essentialism? Forthcoming in D. Medin and S. Atran, Eds., Folkbiology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gelman, S. A., and E. M. Markman. (1986). Categories and induction in young children. Cognition 23:183-209.

Keil, F. (1989). Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Keil, F. (1994). The birth and nurturance of concepts by domains: The origins of concepts of living things. In L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kornblith, H. (1993). Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Locke, J. (1894/1959). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 2. New York: Dover.

Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems in Induction. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.

Mayr, E. (1982). The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Medin, D. (1989). Concepts and conceptual structure. American Psychologist 44:1469-1481.

Medin, D. L., and A. Ortony. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony, Eds., Similarity and Analogical Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179-195.

Mill, J. S. (1843). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: Longmans.

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: W. Morrow.

Schwartz, S. P., Ed. (1977). Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Smith, E. E., and D. L. Medin. (1981). Categories and Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sober, E. (1994). From a Biological Point of View. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Essentialism

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