47 ideas
| 15682 | Even fairly simple animals make judgements based on categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: All organisms form categories: even mealworms have category-based preferences, and higher-order animals such as pigeons or octopi can display quite sophisticated categorical judgements. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: [She cites some 1980 research to support this] This comes as no surprise, as I take categorisation as almost definitive of what a mind is. My surmise is that some sort of 'labelling' system is at the heart of it (like Googlemail labels!). |
| 15691 | Children accept real stable categories, with nonobvious potential that gives causal explanations [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: By five children assume that a variety of categories have rich inductive potential, are stable over outward transformations, include crucial nonobvious properties, have innate potential, privilege causal features, can be explained causally, and are real. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This is Gelman's helpful summary of the findings of research on childhood essentialising, and says the case for this phenomenon is 'compelling'. |
| 14064 | If a statue is identical with the clay of which it is made, that identity is contingent [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Under certain conditions a clay statue is identical with the piece of clay of which it is made, and if this is so then the identity is contingent. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This initiated the modern debate about statues, and it is an attack on Kripke's claim that if two things are identical, then they are necessarily identical. Kripke seems right about Hesperus and Phosphorus, but not about the statue. |
| 14066 | A 'piece' of clay begins when its parts stick together, separately from other clay [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: A 'piece' of clay is a portion of clay which comes into existence when all of its parts come to be stuck to each other, and cease to be stuck to any clay which is not a part of the portion. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: The sort of gormlessly elementary things that philosophers find themselves having to say, but this is a good basic assertion for a discussion of statue and clay, and I can't think of an objection to it. |
| 14067 | Clay and statue are two objects, which can be named and reasoned about [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The piece of clay and the statue are 'objects' - that is to say, they can be designated with proper names, and the logic we ordinarily use will still apply. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: An interesting indication of the way that 'object' is used in modern analytic philosophy, which may not be the way that it is used in ordinary English. The number 'seven', for example, seems to be an object by this criterion. |
| 14069 | We can only investigate the identity once we have designated it as 'statue' or as 'clay' [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: To ask meaningfully what that thing would be, we must designate it either as a statue or as a piece of clay. What that thing would be, apart from the way it is designated, is a question without meaning. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: He obviously has a powerful point, but to suggest that we can only investigate a mysterious object once we have designated it as something sounds daft. It would ruin the fun of archaeology. |
| 15700 | In India, upper-castes essentialize caste more than lower-castes do [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The notion of caste in India is more essentialized among upper-caste than lower-caste individuals. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: In a book defending fairly innate essentialism in the human race, Gelman offers this point as a warning that large cultural ingredients can be involved. Racism is the classic difficulty with essentialism. |
| 15685 | Essentialism is either natural to us, or an accident of our culture, or a necessary result of language [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The two views contrasting with essentialism naturally emerging in childhood are the claim that essentialism is a historical accident emerging from Western philosophy, and that essentialism is an inherent consequence of naming things. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Background') | |
| A reaction: Helpful. I take Idea 15682 to rule out the idea that it is just a feature of western culture. I can't conceive of early man surviving without essentialism. I don't think it rules out the naming view. Animals may do what emerges in us as full 'naming'. |
| 15684 | Children's concepts include nonobvious features, like internal parts, functions and causes [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Children incorporate a variety of nonobvious features into their concepts, including internal parts, functions, causes, and ontological distinctions. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: This remark sums up the general thesis of her book, which she supports with a wealth of first-hand evidence. It supports my view, that the desire and need for explanation is at the root of essentialist concepts. It's hard wired in us. |
| 15681 | Essentialism: real or representational? sortal, causal or ideal? real particulars, or placeholders? [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We map types of essentialism by asking is it in the world or in our representations, is it sortal or causal or ideal, and is it specific particulars or placeholders for the unknown? | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: I am struck by the way that this practising experimental psychologist gets to ask questions and make distinctions much more extensively than most armchair philosophers on the subject. She focuses on the representational, causal, placeholder view. |
| 15678 | Essentialism says categories have a true hidden nature which gives an object its identity [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism is the view that categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly but that gives an object its identity. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: I think the introduction of categories here is a misunderstanding. Does an uncategorisable thing therefore have no identity (even though it has properties)? If categories give objects their identity, what gives categories their identity? |
| 15683 | Sortals are needed for determining essence - the thing must be categorised first [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that sortals are likewise required for determining essence. One cannot answer the question 'What is the essence of this?' without supplying the sortal - of this 'what'. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: I remain baffled by this view. I take the category to be an inductive generalisation from other similar individuals. It can't get off the ground if you don't start with the individuals. Sortals are just a shorthand. |
| 15697 | Kind (unlike individual) essentialism assumes preexisting natural categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: With kind essentialism the person assumes that the world is divided up into preexisting natural categories. Individual essentialism seems not to require any such commitment to kind realism. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Essentialism') | |
| A reaction: This pinpoints my difficulty: how do we decide whether some category or attributed essence is part of a preexisting natural kind? Some natural kinds are self-evident, like water (roughly), but others need subtle teasing out. How is the teasing done? |
| 14076 | Essentialism is the existence of a definite answer as to whether an entity fulfils a condition [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism for a class of entities is that for one entity and a condition which it fulfills, the question of whether it necessarily fulfills the condition has a definite answer apart from the way the entity is specified. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: Yet another definition of essentialism, but resting, as usual in modern discussions, entirely on the notion of necessity. Kit Fine's challenge is that if you investigate the source of the necessity, it turns out to be an essence. |
| 15687 | Kinship is essence that comes in degrees, and age groups are essences that change over time [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Kinship is essentialized, but admits of degrees, ...and people can be essentialist even about categories they do not view as fixed over time, such as age groupings. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 03 'Summary') | |
| A reaction: Given my notion of essence are necessarily explanatory, I embrace both of these points. Being very athletic comes in degrees, and changes over times. |
| 15679 | Essentialism comes from the cognitive need to categorise [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism has its source in the cognitive requirement of categorization in certain domains - particularly as they affect the young learner. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Essentialist') | |
| A reaction: I think the phenomenon is better understood as part of the cognitive requirement to understand and explain. Categorisation is just one way to aid explanation. Children try to understand (essentially) a new animal without categorisation. |
| 15698 | We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children. ...Mothers teach children about kinds, not about essences, and mothers help children identify which categories are richly structured. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 07 'Conclusions') | |
| A reaction: This is a psychologist who specialises in this topic. If you think essentialism is inculcated by a our culture, you will have to blame the fathers. |
| 14077 | Essentialism for concreta is false, since they can come apart under two concepts [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism for the class of concrete things is false, since a statue necessarily fulfils a condition as 'Goliath', but only contingently fulfils it as 'lumpl'. On the other hand, essentialism for the class of individual concepts can be true. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: This rests on his definition of essentialism in Idea 14076. He rests his essentialism about concepts on an account given by Carnap ('Meaning and Necessity' §41). The essence of a statue and the essence of a lump of clay do seem distinct. |
| 15709 | Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism is a reasoning heuristic that allows us to make fairly good predictions much of the time, but it should not be confused with the structure of reality. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Discussion') | |
| A reaction: She particularly cites biology as the area where it might be inaccurate. I'm beginning to think that the operations of induction are the place to look for an good understanding of essentialism. |
| 14070 | A particular statue has sortal persistence conditions, so its origin defines it [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: A proper name like 'Goliath' denotes a thing in the actual world, and invokes a sortal with certain persistence criteria. Hence its origin makes a statue the statue that it is, and if statues in different worlds have the same beginning, they are the same. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: Too neat. There are vague, ambiguous and duplicated origins. Persistence criteria can shift during the existence of a thing (like a club which changes its own constitution). In replicated statues, what is the status of the mould? |
| 15696 | Peope favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: People favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is. ...An object looking like a knife is less likely to be called 'a knife' if it is described as having been created by accident. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Essentialism') | |
| A reaction: I like this because it talks, suggestively, of 'historical paths' rather than of 'origin'. Thus we might judge a person's identity by their traumatic experience rather than by their birth. This doesn't challenge necessity of origin, but affects labels. |
| 14073 | Claims on contingent identity seem to violate Leibniz's Law [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The most prominent objection to contingent identity (as in the case of the statue and its clay) is that it violates Leibniz's Law. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], V) | |
| A reaction: Depends what you mean by a property. The trickiest one would be that the statue has (right now) a disposition to be worth a lot, but the clay doesn't. But I don't think that is really a property of the statue. Properties are a muddle. |
| 14065 | Two identical things must share properties - including creation and destruction times [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: For two things to be strictly identical, they must have all properties in common. That means, among other things, that they must start to exist at the same time and cease to exist at the same time. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: I don't accept that coming into existence at time t is a 'property' of a thing. Coincident objects give you the notion of 'existing as' something, which complicates the whole story. |
| 14074 | Leibniz's Law isn't just about substitutivity, because it must involve properties and relations [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: As a general law of substitutivity of identicals, Leibniz's Law is false. It is a law about properties and relations, that if two things are identical, they have the same properties and relations. It only works in contexts which attribute those. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], V) | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced about relations, which are not intrinsic properties. Under different descriptions, the relations to human minds might differ. |
| 14072 | Possible worlds identity needs a sortal [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Identity across possible worlds makes sense only with respect to a sortal | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], IV) | |
| A reaction: See Gibbard's other ideas from this paper. I fear that the sortal invoked is too uncertain and slippery to do any useful job, and I can't see any principled difficulty with naming something before you can think of a sortal for it. |
| 14078 | Only concepts, not individuals, can be the same across possible worlds [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: It is meaningless to talk of the same concrete thing in different possible worlds, ...but it makes sense to speak of the same individual concept, which is just a function which assigns to each possible world in a set an individual in that world. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: A lovely bold response to the problem of transworld identity, but one which needs investigation. It sounds very promising to me. 'Aristotle' is a cocept, not a name. There is no separate category of 'names'. Wow. (Attach dispositions to concepts?). |
| 14079 | Kripke's semantics needs lots of intuitions about which properties are essential [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: To use Kripke's semantics, one needs extensive intuitions that certain properties are essential and others accidental. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], X) | |
| A reaction: As usual, we could substitute the word 'necessary' for 'essential' without changing his meaning. If we are always referring to 'our' Hubert Humphrey is speculations about him, then nearly all of his properties will be necessary ones. |
| 15707 | There is intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist and deontological understanding [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The modes of understanding (or modes of construal) which have been proposed are intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist (perhaps), and deontological. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Broadening') | |
| A reaction: She cites psychological research to support this, and calls it 'a relatively small number' of modes. Compare Aristotle's four modes of cause/explanation. |
| 15703 | Memories often conform to a theory, rather than being neutral [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Memory is notorious for conforming to theory (rather than memory being a neutral source of information). | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 09 'Theory') | |
| A reaction: This observation by a psychologist is music to sceptics about objectivity. Memory is so fundamental to our basic epistemology that it could even be the nature of thought itself. |
| 15708 | Inductive success is rewarded with more induction [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Inductive success is rewarded with more induction. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Broadening') | |
| A reaction: I love this one. Neat, accurate, and central to how we understand the world. I take inductive success to be stored as labels, concepts, categories, words and general truths, which are then our resource for further attempts. |
| 15694 | Children overestimate the power of a single example [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We suggest that children overestimate the power of a single example. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This conclusion arises from extensive psychological research. 'My grandma smoked, and she lived to be 97' - adults do this too. Wittgenstein says assuming other minds because of your own is induction from one example! |
| 15695 | Children make errors in induction by focusing too much on categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Because of their narrow focus, children's sensitivity to categories as the basis of induction is a reasoning bias that, though useful much of the time, results in systematic errors. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This is the bad sense of 'essentialism' which worries its opponents. Presumably, though, my favoured scientific essentialism will be 'scientific', and avoid this problem. The relation between categories and induction needs to be clear. |
| 15692 | People tend to be satisfied with shallow explanations [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: People tend to be satisfied with rather shallow explanations. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Is essentialism') | |
| A reaction: She cites some psychological research to support this. Pretty obvious really. I take the so-called 'scientific method' to be nothing more than ceasing to be satisfied with such shallowness. |
| 20653 | Six reduction levels: groups, lives, cells, molecules, atoms, particles [Putnam/Oppenheim, by Watson] |
| Full Idea: There are six 'reductive levels' in science: social groups, (multicellular) living things, cells, molecules, atoms, and elementary particles. | |
| From: report of H.Putnam/P.Oppenheim (Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis [1958]) by Peter Watson - Convergence 10 'Intro' | |
| A reaction: I have the impression that fields are seen as more fundamental that elementary particles. What is the status of the 'laws' that are supposed to govern these things? What is the status of space and time within this picture? |
| 15680 | Folk essentialism rests on belief in natural kinds, in hidden properties, and on words indicating structures [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The three components of essentialism as a folk belief are the idea that certain categories are natural kinds, the idea that some unobservable property causes the way things are, and the idea that words reflect real structures. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') |
| 15686 | Labels may indicate categories which embody an essence [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Labels may signal categories that are believed to embody an essence. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 02 'Privileged') | |
| A reaction: This is quoted by her, as a summary of a substantial body of research which she endorses. I cite it because it pinpoints my own view. I take 'labels' to be basic to minds, as organisers of thought, and this ties essences to labels. Satisfying picture. |
| 15690 | Causal properties are seen as more central to category concepts [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Properties that enter into causally meaningful links are better remembered and are treated as more central to the category than properties that are not causally meaningful. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation2') | |
| A reaction: This is a summary of considerable psychological research. This account not only sounds plausible, but would fit better withy why we form concepts and categories in the first place. We are trying to relate to the causations of nature. |
| 15688 | Categories are characterized by distance from a prototype [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: On prototype views, categories are characterized by distance from a prototype. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation') | |
| A reaction: Gelman observes that this view makes no reference to any causal features of things. This cuts them off from using underlying essences in the process of categorisation and concept-formation. How do you spot a prototype, with no category? |
| 15689 | Theory-based concepts use rich models to show which similarities really matter [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Theory-based approaches to categories are a response to the limitations of mere similarities holding the category together, and require knowledge-rich explanatory models to say which features are more central to a concept. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation1') | |
| A reaction: I see a promising account in linking theory theory to essentialism. For a physical object (or even for a process) infer a structure, and then identify what is most important in that structure. That gives you your stable, agreed concept. |
| 15699 | Prelinguistic infants acquire and use many categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Language does not appear to be necessary for forming categories, since prelinguistic infants acquire many categories, and even use categories to form inferences about unknown properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: She cites lots of research in support of this claim. The idea may come as a surprise to some people, but not to me. I take it that categorisation is what a brain is for, including animal brains. |
| 14071 | Naming a thing in the actual world also invokes some persistence criteria [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The reference of a name in the actual world is fixed partly by invoking a set of persistence criteria which determine what thing it names. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: This is offered as a modification to Kripke, to deal with the statue and clay. I fear that the 'persistence criteria' may be too vague, and too subject to possible change after the origin, to do the job required. |
| 15693 | One sample of gold is enough, but one tree doesn't give the height of trees [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We can confidently determine the chemical composition of gold from just a single sample, but we cannot determine the height of trees from just a single tree. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: The tricky word here is 'confidently'. If you meet one Latvian who is nice, do you assume they are all nice? At what point do you decide gold etc. really are natural kinds, where one sample tells all? Evolution of species... |
| 15701 | Nouns seem to invoke stable kinds more than predicates do [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Children judged personal characteristics as more stable when they were referred to by a noun ('She is a carrot eater') than by a verbal predicate ('She eats carrots whenever she can') | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Naming') | |
| A reaction: This fits with my feeling that 'labels' are the basis of how the mind works. The noun invokes a genuine category of thing, where a predicate attaches to some preselected category ('she'). Gelman says names encourage inductions. |
| 15705 | Essentialism encourages us to think about the world scientifically [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism encourages a 'scientific' mindset in thinking about the natural world, a belief that intensive study of a natural domain will yield ever more underlying properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Maybe scientists must be committed to essences, the way mathematicians must be committed to numbers? This idea spendidly opposes the doubts expressed by Popper. |
| 15702 | Essentialism doesn't mean we know the essences [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism does not entail that people know what the essence is. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 09 'Theory') | |
| A reaction: This is a fundamental and (I would say) fairly obvious point, but it needs to be made to the more passionate opponents of essentialism. |
| 15704 | Essentialism starts from richly structured categories, leading to a search for underlying properties [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: If my speculations are correct, then essentialism starts out strictly as a belief that many categories are richly structured kinds, then additionally becomes a search for underlying inherent properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 10 'Figuring') | |
| A reaction: This is her summary of extensive essentialist research among children. She favours the priority of kinds and categories. We actually change taxonomies on the basis of revisions in our accounts of essence. Science negotiates. |
| 15706 | A major objection to real essences is the essentialising of social categories like race, caste and occupation [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: One major argument against the view that essences are real is the rampant essentializing of categories that are socially constructed (such as race, caste and occupation). | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Is essentialism') | |
| A reaction: You can't argue with that. It raises the question of whether the approach of scientific essentialism has any value in the social, rather than physical, sciences. We jokingly essentialise groups of people such as referees or Oxonians. |