54 ideas
| 7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
| 15682 | Even fairly simple animals make judgements based on categories [Gelman] |
| 15691 | Children accept real stable categories, with nonobvious potential that gives causal explanations [Gelman] |
| 14508 | A 'thisness' is a thing's property of being identical with itself (not the possession of self-identity) [Adams,RM] |
| 14511 | There are cases where mere qualities would not ensure an intrinsic identity [Adams,RM] |
| 15700 | In India, upper-castes essentialize caste more than lower-castes do [Gelman] |
| 15685 | Essentialism is either natural to us, or an accident of our culture, or a necessary result of language [Gelman] |
| 15684 | Children's concepts include nonobvious features, like internal parts, functions and causes [Gelman] |
| 15681 | Essentialism: real or representational? sortal, causal or ideal? real particulars, or placeholders? [Gelman] |
| 15678 | Essentialism says categories have a true hidden nature which gives an object its identity [Gelman] |
| 15683 | Sortals are needed for determining essence - the thing must be categorised first [Gelman] |
| 15697 | Kind (unlike individual) essentialism assumes preexisting natural categories [Gelman] |
| 15687 | Kinship is essence that comes in degrees, and age groups are essences that change over time [Gelman] |
| 12031 | Essences are taken to be qualitative properties [Adams,RM] |
| 15679 | Essentialism comes from the cognitive need to categorise [Gelman] |
| 15698 | We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children [Gelman] |
| 15709 | Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman] |
| 15696 | Peope favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is [Gelman] |
| 12034 | If the universe was cyclical, totally indiscernible events might occur from time to time [Adams,RM] |
| 14510 | Two events might be indiscernible yet distinct, if there was a universe cyclical in time [Adams,RM] |
| 16455 | Black's two globes might be one globe in highly curved space [Adams,RM] |
| 14507 | Are possible worlds just qualities, or do they include primitive identities as well? [Adams,RM] |
| 11964 | Possible worlds are world-stories, maximal descriptions of whole non-existent worlds [Adams,RM, by Molnar] |
| 16451 | Adams says anti-haecceitism reduces all thisness to suchness [Adams,RM, by Stalnaker] |
| 11901 | Haecceitism may or may not involve some logical connection to essence [Adams,RM, by Mackie,P] |
| 14512 | Moderate Haecceitism says transworld identities are primitive, but connected to qualities [Adams,RM] |
| 15707 | There is intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist and deontological understanding [Gelman] |
| 7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
| 15703 | Memories often conform to a theory, rather than being neutral [Gelman] |
| 7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
| 15708 | Inductive success is rewarded with more induction [Gelman] |
| 15694 | Children overestimate the power of a single example [Gelman] |
| 15695 | Children make errors in induction by focusing too much on categories [Gelman] |
| 15692 | People tend to be satisfied with shallow explanations [Gelman] |
| 7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
| 7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
| 7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
| 15680 | Folk essentialism rests on belief in natural kinds, in hidden properties, and on words indicating structures [Gelman] |
| 15686 | Labels may indicate categories which embody an essence [Gelman] |
| 15690 | Causal properties are seen as more central to category concepts [Gelman] |
| 15688 | Categories are characterized by distance from a prototype [Gelman] |
| 15689 | Theory-based concepts use rich models to show which similarities really matter [Gelman] |
| 15699 | Prelinguistic infants acquire and use many categories [Gelman] |
| 12032 | Direct reference is by proper names, or indexicals, or referential uses of descriptions [Adams,RM] |
| 7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
| 15693 | One sample of gold is enough, but one tree doesn't give the height of trees [Gelman] |
| 15701 | Nouns seem to invoke stable kinds more than predicates do [Gelman] |
| 15705 | Essentialism encourages us to think about the world scientifically [Gelman] |
| 15702 | Essentialism doesn't mean we know the essences [Gelman] |
| 15704 | Essentialism starts from richly structured categories, leading to a search for underlying properties [Gelman] |
| 15706 | A major objection to real essences is the essentialising of social categories like race, caste and occupation [Gelman] |
| 7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
| 7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
| 7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |