The essentialist aspect of naive theories.

@article{citeulike:186126, abstract = {Recent work on children's inferences concerning biological and chemical categories has suggested that children (and perhaps adults) are essentialists - a 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.}, address = {Philosophy Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305- 2155, USA. strevens@csli.stanford.edu}, author = {Strevens, M. }, citeulike-article-id = {186126}, issn = {0010-0277}, journal = {Cognition}, keywords = {essentialism}, month = {February}, number = {2}, pages = {149--175}, posted-at = {2005-05-07 18:12:12}, priority = {2}, title = {The essentialist aspect of naive theories.}, url = {http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10617780}, volume = {74}, year = {2000} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:186126 L3 - citeulike-article-id:186126 TI - The essentialist aspect of naive theories. JF - Cognition VL - 74 IS - 2 SP - 149 EP - 175 AD - Philosophy Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305- 2155, USA. strevens@csli.stanford.edu SN - 0010-0277 N2 - Recent work on children's inferences concerning biological and chemical categories has suggested that children (and perhaps adults) are essentialists - a 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. KW - essentialism AU - Strevens, M PY - 2000/02/14/ UR - http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10617780 ER -