Essentialism?

I don’t know just when I first read references to ‘essentialism,’ references to something that was bad, but the badness of which seemed a bit obscure to me. All of a sudden, people seemed to be critiquing this essentialism, but just where this critique came from, that I don’t know. Since that time, way long ago, I’ve seen the term used quite a bit, and have more or less become comfortable with it, though the critique.... Most recently, essentialism’s turned up at ARCADE, in a post by Christopher Warley, Un-canonizing Lady Mary Wroth and in this post by Josh Landy, his second shot across Derrida’s bow.

I’m most comfortable with the term, however, arenas other than literature. In (the philosophy of) biology it refers to the idea that individuals in some class of organisms (generally at the species level) have certain defining characteristics; those characteristics thus constitute the essence of the class (for example, see this blog post by John Wilkins). The problem is that it is very difficult to come up with such lists of defining characters. Which is to say, there is a some procedure for determining that ‘these are all the same thing’ and another procedure for saying what it is that makes them the same. The second procedure doesn’t seem to produce results that agree with those of the first procedure and, for whatever, that first procedure takes precedence.

Just how and why that mismatch should occur certainly needs looking into. But not here, and not by me.

Essences also crop up in that branch of cognitive psychology that tries to figure out what concepts are. The concepts in question tend not to be abstract concepts, but rather simple and concrete ones, things such as birds and furniture. What’s happened over the last two or three decades is that the so-called ‘classical’ view of concepts has failed various experimental investigations. As I say in my review of Gregory Murphy’s The Big Book of Concepts:

This [classical] view dates back to Aristotle and holds that concepts are given meaning by necessary and sufficient conditions. One problem with this view is that it has proven very difficult to specify those conditions for both real and artificial concepts—a discussion in which Wittgenstein has been very influential. Another problem is that the view doesn't admit of gradations. Something either is, or is not, an example of a particular concept. This is difficult to square with the line of experimental investigation initiated by Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues in the mid-70s. They have found that, for example, a robin is more birdlike than a chicken and that a chair is more furniture-like than a piano. The classical view has no way of accounting for this well-replicated empirical result.

Note that the biologists are talking about a process that’s happening in the natural world and saying that that process doesn’t involve essences; something else is going on. The psychologists are talking about how we think. That we seem to think robins are more birdlike than chickens has nothing to do with whether or not that is so in any biological sense.

One might ask: If our minds do not, in fact, categorize things by essences, then how did the notion of essence arise? I’m not sure that the question is a good one. For the notion of essences did not arise as an account of how our minds work; it arose as an account of the world. But if, as the evolutionary psychologists say, our minds are adapted to the world, and our minds do not traffic in essences, then how is it that we came to adopt that erroneous notion that DOESN’T square up with the world? And why is it so very difficult to dislodge this erroneous notion?

Frankly, I’m not sure I even understand (the implications of) what I asked in those last two questions. And I fear that, if I were to venture ahead, things would only get worse. There’s a conceptual thicket ahead, and I don’t want to get tangled up in it.

So I’m going to back off.

But I want to make one parting observation. We’ve been told that the quantum world is Very Different from the mundane world, and thus it is very difficult to understand. Just do the math, some physicists say, don’t worry about the interpretation. OK. But, is the quantum world the Only Strange World there is? If this business of essences is such a sticky mess, could it be that the whole world is, in fact, Deeply Strange, and resistant to our casual and comfortable conceptualizations?