Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as "dog,"
"man," or "intelligence," have an underlying reality or true nature
that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea come from?
In this book, Susan Gelman argues that essentialism is an early
cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment
to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond
the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words,
generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the
insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture,
and constructing causal explanations. Gelman argues against the
standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious,
instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to
search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. She also attacks
claims that children build up their knowledge of the world based on
simple, associative learning strategies, arguing that children's
concepts are embedded in rich folk theories. Parents don't
explicitly teach children to essentialize; instead, during the
preschool years, children spontaneously construct concepts and
beliefs that reflect an essentialist bias.
Essentialist accounts have been offered, in one form or another,
for thousands of years, extending back at least to Aristotle and
Plato. Yet this book is the first to address the issues surrounding
essentialism from a psychological perspective. Gelman synthesizes
over 15 years of empirical research on essentialism into a unified
framework and explores the broader lessons that the research
imparts concerning, among other things, human concepts, children's
thinking, and the ways in whichlanguage influences thought. This
volume will appeal to developmental, cognitive, and social
psychologists, as well as to scholars in cognitive science and
philosophy.
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