What Is Psychological Essentialism?
Much of human cognition is characterized by psychological essentialism (Gelman 2003). In its broadest form, psychological essentialism is a conceptual framework that defines our naïve-metaphysical perspective on the structure of objects and categories. Its basis is the distinction between two kinds of properties: Objects of a given kind can have many accidental properties: These are properties that the object in question can but need not have, and in respect to which it can change without becoming a different kind of object. Essentialproperties (Essential properties are sometimes called “defining,” and accidental ones “characteristic.” Research in cognitive development, for example, suggests that children’s lexical semantics undergo a “characteristic-to-defining” shift in the preschool years such that children initially base word meaning on superficial features associated with prototypical instances of a given kind, and only later focus on the...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Atran, S. (1998). Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(4), 547–569.
Bloom, P. (1996). Intention, history, and artifact concepts. Cognition, 60(1), 1–29.
Bräuer, J., & Call, J. (2011). The magic cup: Great apes and domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) individuate objects according to their properties. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 125(3), 353–361. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023009.
Cacchione, T., Schaub, S., & Rakoczy, H. (2013). Fourteen-month-old infants infer the continuous identity of objects on the basis of non-visible causal properties. Developmental Psychology, 49(7), 1325–1329. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029746.
Cacchione, T., Hrubesch, C., Call, J., & Rakoczy, H. (2016). Are apes essentialists? Scope and limits of psychological essentialism in great apes. Animal Cognition, 19(5), 921–937. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-0991-4.
Cimpian, A., & Salomon, E. (2014). The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(5), 461–480. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x13002197.
Fodor, J. A. (1998). Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Fontanari, L., Rugani, R., Regolin, L., & Vallortigara, G. (2011). Object individuation in 3-day-old chicks: Use of property and spatiotemporal information. Developmental Science, 14(5), 1235–1244. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2011.01074.x.
Fontanari, L., Rugani, R., Regolin, L., & Vallortigara, G. (2014). Use of kind information for object individuation in young domestic chicks. Animal Cognition, 17(4), 925–935. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-013-0725-9.
Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gelman, S. A. (2013). Artifacts and essentialism. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 449–463. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0142-7.
Gelman, S. A., & Davidson, N. S. (2013). Conceptual influences on category-based induction. Cognitive Psychology, 66(3), 327–353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2013.02.001.
Gelman, S. A., & Rhodes, M. (2012). “Two-thousand years of stasis”: How psychological essentialism impedes evolutionary understanding. In K. Sengren, S. Brem, E. Evans, & G. Sinatra (Eds.), Evolution challenges: Integrating research and practice in teaching and learning about evolution (pp. 3–21). New York: Oxford University Press.
Haslam, N., & Whelan, J. (2008). Human natures: Psychological essentialism in thinking about differences between people. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(3), 1297–1312. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00112.x.
Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, kinds and cognitive development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Keil, F. C., & Battermann, N. (1984). A characteristic-to-defining shift in the development of word meaning. Journal of Word Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 23, 221–236.
Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mayr, E. (1982). The growth of biological thought: Diversity, evolution, and inheritance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Medin, D. L., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 179–195). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mendes, N., Rakoczy, H., & Call, J. (2008). Ape metaphysics: Object individuation without language. Cognition, 106(2), 730–749.
Mendes, N., Rakoczy, H., & Call, J. (2011). Primates do not spontaneously use shape properties for object individuation: A competence or a performance problem? Animal Cognition, 14, 407–414.
Newman, G. E., Herrmann, P., Wynn, K., & Keil, F. C. (2008). Biases towards internal features in infants’ reasoning about objects. Cognition, 107(2), 420–432.
Phillips, W., & Santos, L. R. (2007). Evidence for kind representations in the absence of language: Experiments with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Cognition, 102(3), 455–463.
Phillips, W., Shankar, M., & Santos, L. R. (2010). Essentialism in the absence of language? Evidence from rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Developmental Science, 13(4), F1–F7. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00982.x.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of ‘meaning’. In K. Gunderson (Ed.), Language, mind and knowledge (pp. 131–193). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1957). Speaking of objects. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 31, 5–22.
Rhodes, M., & Mandalaywala, T. M. (2017). The development and developmental consequences of social essentialism. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 8(4), e1437. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1437.
Santos, L. R., Sulkowski, G. M., Spaepen, G. M., & Hauser, M. D. (2002). Object individuation using property/kind information in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Cognition, 83(3), 241–264.
Xu, F. (2002). The role of language in acquiring object kind concepts in infancy. Cognition, 85(3), 223–250.
Xu, F. (2007). Sortal concepts, object individuation, and language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(9), 400–406.
Xu, F., & Carey, S. (1996). Infants’ metaphysics: The case of numerical identity. Cognitive Psychology, 30(2), 111–153.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Rakoczy, H., Cacchione, T. (2017). Essentialism. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1569-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1569-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47829-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences