Cogprints
Login | Create Account

On the functional origins of essentialism

Barrett, H. Clark (2001) On the functional origins of essentialism. [Journal (Paginated)] (In Press)

[img]
Preview
PDF
189Kb

Abstract

This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism results from a history of natural selection acting on human representation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist representational systems are especially well suited for representing natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductive potential of such kinds, then it must be subserved by cognitive mechanisms that carry out at least three distinct functions: identifying these kinds in the environment, constructing essentialized representations of them, and constraining inductive inferences about kinds. Moreover, there are different kinds of kinds, ranging from nonliving substances to biological taxa to within-species kinds such as sex, and the causal processes that render these categories coherent for the purposes of inductive generalization vary. If the evolved function of essentialism is to support inductive generalization under ignorance of true causes, and if kinds of kinds vary in the implicit assumptions that support valid inductive inferences about them, then we expect different, functionally incompatible modes of essentialist thinking for different kinds. In particular, there should be differences in how biological and nonbiological substances, biological taxa, and biological and social role kinds are essentialized. The functional differences between these kinds of essentialism are discussed.

Item Type:Journal (Paginated)
Keywords:essentialism induction concepts cognitive development folk biology domain specificity evolutionary psychology ecological rationality
Subjects:Psychology > Developmental Psychology
Psychology > Evolutionary Psychology
Philosophy > Philosophy of Mind
ID Code:1729
Deposited By:Barrett, Clark
Deposited On:07 Aug 2001
Last Modified:19 Dec 2009 19:17

References in Article

Select the SEEK icon to attempt to find the referenced article. If it does not appear to be in cogprints you will be forwarded to the paracite service. Poorly formated references will probably not work.

Atran, S. (1990) Cognitive foundations of natural history (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Atran, S. (1994) Core domains versus scientific theories, in L.A. Hirschfeld & S.A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Atran, S. (1998) Folk biology and the anthropology of science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, pp. 547-611.

Au, K. T. (1994) Developing an intuitive understanding of substance kinds, Cognitive Psychology, 27, pp. 7-111.

Banton, M. (1987) Racial theories (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Barrett, H.C., Cosmides, L, & Tooby, J. (in prep.). By descent or by design? Evidence for two modes of biological reasoning.

Berlin, B. (1992) Ethnobiological classification (Princeton, Princeton University Press).

Bloom, P. (1996) Intention, history, and artifact concepts, Cognition, 60, pp. 1-29.

Boyer, P. (1990) Tradition as truth and communication (New York, Cambridge University Press).

Boyer, P. (1994) The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion (Berkeley, University of California Press).

Braisby, N., Franks, B., & Hampton, J. (1996) Essentialism, word use, and concepts, Cognition, 59, pp. 247-274.

Caramazza, A., Hillis, A., Leek, E.C., & Miozzo, M. (1994) The organization of lexical knowledge in the brain: Evidence from category- and modality-specific deficits, in L.A. Hirschfeld & S.A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Carey, S. (1985) Conceptual change in children (Cambridge, MIT Press).

Carey, S. (1995) On the origins of causal understanding, in D. Sperber, D. Premack, & A. Premack, (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Coley, J.D., Medin, D.L., & Atran, S. (1997) Does privilege have its rank? Inductive inferences within folkbiological taxonomies, Cognition, 63, pp. 73-112.

Coley, J.D., Medin, D.L., Proffitt, J.B., Lynch, E., Atran, S. (1999) Inductive reasoning in folkbiological thought, in D.L. Medin & S. Atran, (Eds.), Folkbiology (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).

Dawkins, R. (1982) The extended phenotype (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Dennett, D.C. (1987) The intentional stance (Cambridge, MIT Press).

Dickinson, D.K. (1987) The development of a concept of material kind, Science Education, 71, pp. 615-628.

Dupré, J. (1993) The disorder of things: Metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science (Cambridge, Harvard University Press).

Fuss, D. (1989) Essentially speaking: Feminism, nature, and difference (New York, Routledge).

Gelman, R. (1990) First principles organize attention to and learning about relevant data: Number and the animate-inanimate distinction as examples, Cognitive Science, 14, pp. 79-106.

Gelman, S.A. (1988) The development of induction within natural kind and artifact categories, Cognitive Psychology, 20, pp. 65-95.

Gelman, S.A. (1992) Children's conception of personality traits (commentary), Human Development, 35, pp. 280-285.

Gelman, S.A., & Bloom, P. (2000) Young children are sensitive to how an object was created when deciding what to name it, Cognition, 76, pp. 91-103.

Gelman, S.A., & Coley, J.D. (1990) The importance of knowing a dodo is a bird: categories and inferences in two-year olds, Developmental psychology, 26, pp. 796-804.

Gelman, S.A., Coley, J.D., & Gottfried, G.M. (1994) Essentialist beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories, in L.A. Hirschfeld & S.A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Gelman, S.A., Collman, P., & Maccoby, E. (1986) Inferring properties from categories versus inferring categories from properties: The case of gender, Child Development, 62, pp. 396-414.

Gelman, S.A., & Diesendruck, G. (1999) A reconsideration of concepts: On the compatibility of psychological essentialism and context sensitivity, in E.K. Scholnick, K Nelson, S.A. Gelman, & P.H. Miller (Eds.), Conceptual development: Piaget's legacy (Mahwah, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

Gelman, S.A., & Hirschfeld, L.A. (1999) How biological is essentialism? in D.L. Medin & S. Atran, (Eds.), Folkbiology (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).

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

Gelman, S.A., & Markman, E.M. (1987) Young children's inductions from natural kinds: The role of categories and appearances, Child Development, 8, pp. 157-167.

Gelman, S.A., & Spelke, E.S. (1981) The development of thought about animate and inanimate objects: implications for research on social cognition, in. J.H. Flavell & L. Ross (Eds.), Social cognitive development: Frontiers and possible futures (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Gelman, S.A., & Wellman, H.M. (1991) Insides and essences: Early understandings of the nonobvious, Cognition, 38, pp. 213-244.

Gergely, G., Nádasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Bíró, S. (1995) Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age, Cognition, 56, pp. 165-193.

Gigerenzer, G. (2000) Adaptive Thinking (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Are ethnic groups 'species' to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories, in press, Current Anthropology, 42.

Goodman, N. (1954) Fact fiction and forecast (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).

Hirschfeld, L.A. (1986) Kinship and cognition: Genealogy and the meaning of kinship terms, Current Anthropology, 27, pp. 217-242.

Hirschfeld, L.A. (1993) Discovering social difference: The role of appearance in the development of racial awareness, Cognitive Psychology, 25, pp. 317-350.

Hirschfeld, L. A. (1994) Is the acquisition of social categories based on domain-specific competences or on knowledge transfer? in L.A. Hirschfeld & S.A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Hirschfeld, L. A. (1995) Do children have a theory of race? Cognition, 54, pp. 209-252.

Hirschfeld, L.A. (1996) Race in the making: Cognition, culture, and the child's construction of human kinds (Cambridge, MIT Press).

Kalish, C. (1995) Essentialism and graded membership in animal and artifact categories, Memory and Cognition, 23, pp. 335-353.

Keil, F.C. (1989) Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development (Cambridge, MIT Press).

Keil, F.C. (1994) The birth and nurturance of concepts by domains: The origins of concepts of living things, in L.A. Hirschfeld & S.A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Keil, F.C. (1995) The growth of causal understandings of natural kinds, in D. Sperber, D. Premack, & A. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Keil, F.C., Smith, W.C., Simons, D.J., Levin, D.T. (1998) Two dogmas of conceptual empiricism: implications for hybrid models of the structure of knowledge, Cognition, 65, pp. 103-135.

Keleman, D. (1999) Function, goals, and intention: children's teleological reasoning about objects, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, pp. 461-468.

Kripke S. (1972) Naming and necessity (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).

Leslie, A.M. (1994) ToMM, ToBy, and Agency: core architecture and domain specificity, in L. Hirschfeld & S. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Locke, J. (1689) An essay concerning human understanding (6th Ed., ILT Digital Classics, 1995).

MacCoby, E.E., & Jacklin, C.N. (1974) The psychology of sex differences (Stanford, Stanford University Press).

Malt, B.C. (1994) Water is not H2O, Cognitive Psychology, 27, pp. 41-70.

Mandler, J.M. (1992) How to build a baby: II. Conceptual primitives, Psychological Review, 99, pp. 587-604.

Mandler, J.M., Bauer, P.J., & McDonough, L. (1991) Separating the sheep from the goats: Differentiating global categories, Cognitive Psychology, 23, pp. 263-298.

Mandler, J.M., & McDonough, L. (1998) Studies in inductive inference in infancy, Cognitive Psychology, 37, pp. 60-96.

Markman, E.M. (1989) Categorization and naming in children: Problems of induction (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).

Matan, A., and Carey, S. (2001) Developmental changes within the core of artifact concepts, Cognition, 78, pp. 1-26.

Mayr, E. (1982) The growth of biological thought (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).

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

Medin, D.L., & Ortony, A. (1989) Psychological essentialism, in S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Millikan, R.G. (1984) Language, thought, and other biological categories (Cambridge, MIT Press).

Millikan, R.G. (1998) A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: More mama, more milk, and more mouse, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, pp. 55-100.

Millikan, R.G. (2000) On clear and confused ideas: An essay about substance concepts (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Piaget, J. (1951) The child's conception of the world (London, Routledge Kegan Paul).

Putnam, H. (1975) The meaning of "meaning", in H. Putnam (Ed.), Mind, language and reality: Philosophical papers, vol. 2 (New York, Cambridge University Press).

Quine, W.V.O. (1977) Natural kinds, in S. P. Schwartz (Ed.), Naming, necessity, and natural kinds (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press).

Rosch, E., & Mervis, C.B. (1975) Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories, Cognitive Psychology, 7, pp. 573-605.

Rothbart, M., & Taylor, M. (1990) Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? in G. Semin & K. Fiedler (Eds.), Language and social cognition (London, Sage).

Rozin, P. Millman, L., & Nemeroff, C. (1986) Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, pp. 703-712.

Sherry, D.F., & Schacter, D.L. (1987) The evolution of multiple memory systems, Psychological Review, 94, pp. 439-454.

Simons, D.J., & Keil, F.C. (1995) An abstract to concrete shift in the development of biological thought: the insides story, Cognition, 56, pp. 129-163.

Smith, C., Carey, S., & Wiser, M. (1985) On differentiation: A case study of the development of the concepts of size, weight, and density, Cognition, 21, pp. 177-237.

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

Sober, E. (1988) Reconstructing the past (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).

Sperber, D. (1994) The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations, in L.A. Hirschfeld & S.A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Springer, K. (1992) Children's awareness of the biological implications of kinship, Child Development, 63, pp. 950-959.

Springer, K. (1995) Acquiring a naïve theory of kinship through inference, Child Development, 66, pp. 547-558.

Springer, K. (1996) Young children's understanding of a biological basis for parent-offspring relations, Child Development, 67, pp. 2841-2856.

Strevens, M. (2000) The essentialist aspect of naïve theories, Cognition, 74, pp. 149-175.

Symons, D. (1979) The evolution of human sexuality (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Taylor, M. (1996) The development of children's beliefs about social and biological aspects of gender differences, Child Development, 67, pp. 1555-1571.

Trivers, R.L. (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection, in B. Campbell, (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (Chicago, Aldine).

Yuill, N. (1992) Children's conception of personality traits, Human Development, 35, pp. 265-279.

Metadata

Repository Staff Only: item control page

Cogprints is powered by EPrints 3 which is developed by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. More information and software credits.