Essentialism

TYPES OF ESSENTIALISM

CRITICISMS OF ESSENTIALISM

PSYCHOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Essentialism is the idea that members of certain categories have an underlying, unchanging property or attribute (essence) that determines identity and causes outward behavior and appearance. An essentialist account of gender, for example, holds that differences between males and females are determined by fixed, inherent features of those individuals. The doctrine of essentialism is widespread in practice, underlying many approaches (both historical and current) in the biological sciences, the social sciences, and cultural studies. Essentialist ideas underlie much lay skepticism toward biological evolution; such ideas saturate discussions of race and gender as well as of ethnicity and nationality. In gender studies, essentialism has been important as a focus of criticism and, less often, as an explanatory strategy (e.g., the notion of a “gay gene”).

TYPES OF ESSENTIALISM

Essentialism may be divided into three types: sortal, causal, and ideal. The sortal essence is the set of defining characteristics that all and only members of a category share. This notion of essence is captured in Aristotle’s distinction between essential and accidental properties. For example, on this view the essence of a mother would be the property of having given birth to a person (rather than an accidental property, such as baking cookies). In effect, this characterization is a restatement of the classical view of concepts: Meaning (or identity) is supplied by a set of necessary and sufficient features that determine whether an entity does or does not belong in a category. However, the viability of this account has been called into question by psychological research on human concepts. The causal essence is the entity or quality that causes other category-typical properties to emerge and be sustained, and that confers identity. The causal essence is used to explain the observable properties of category members. Whereas the sortal essence could apply to any entity, the causal essence applies only to entities for which inherent, hidden properties determine observable qualities. For example, the causal essence of water may be something like H₂O, which is responsible for various observable properties that water has. Thus, the cluster of properties “odorless, tasteless, and colorless” is not a causal essence of water, despite being true of all members of the category, because the properties have no direct causal force on other properties.

The ideal essence has no actual instantiation in the world. For example, on this view the essence of “justice” is some abstract quality that is imperfectly realized in real-world instances of people performing just deeds. None of these just deeds perfectly embodies “justice,” but each reflects some aspect of it. Plato’s cave allegory (in The Republic ), in which what we see of the world are mere shadows of what is real and true, exemplifies this view. The ideal essence thus contrasts with both the sortal and the causal essences. There are relatively little empirical data available on ideal essences in human reasoning.

CRITICISMS OF ESSENTIALISM

Essentialism is often implicit. Theorists rarely self-identify as essentialist; more often, a position is characterized as “essentialist” by others, typically as a form of criticism. Essentialist indications include a cluster of separable ideas—for example, treating properties as genetically rather than socially determined, assuming that properties are immutable, or assuming that a category captures a wealth of nonobvious properties, thereby having the potential to generate many novel inferences (e.g., Arthur R. Jensen’s arguments in his 1969 article regarding racial differences in IQ). Any of these assumptions could be considered evidence for an essentialist framework.

In the social sciences, essentialist accounts are highly controversial. Essentialist accounts of race, ethnicity, or gender have been criticized for reducing complex, historically contingent effects to fixed and inherent properties of individuals. Anti-essentialist accounts emphasize the importance of social context, environmental factors, and structural factors (including economics and class). Such accounts are often grouped together under the heading social (or cultural or discursive ) constructionism ; as Laura Lee Downs noted in her 1993 article, at their best they provide detailed accounts of the social reproduction of gender, ethnic, and racial categories, and at their worst slide into voluntarism. An important analytic strategy, put forward by Fredrik Barth in 1969 and Judith Irvine and Susan Gal in 2000, has been to eschew an account of the categories of social groups in favor of examining the social and cultural conditions by which they are differentiated.

Racial categories illustrate the perils and shortcomings of essentialism. Although race is often essentialized, anthropologists and biologists widely agree that race has no essence. The superficial physical dimensions along which people vary (such as skin color or hair texture) do not map neatly onto racial groupings. Observable human differences also do not form correlated feature clusters. Skin color is not predictive of “deep” causal features (such as gene frequencies for anything other than skin color). There is no gene for race as it is commonly understood.

Culture frequently serves as a stand-in for race in sortal essentialist frameworks, as it did in South Africa under the apartheid regime. The doctrine of ethnic primordialism (that ethnicities are ancient and natural) was a popular explanatory device in the 1950s and 1960s to account for apparent ethnic and regional fissures in the developing world. It returned after the fall of the Berlin wall to account for the instability of former socialist republics, most dramatically in Yugoslavia, and remains a powerful force in international relations despite the availability of nuanced, nonessentialist explanatory accounts.

Essentialism is also criticized for its political and social costs, in particular for encouraging and justifying stereotyping of social categories (including race, gender, and sexual orientation), and perpetuating the assumption that artificial distinctions (such as caste or class) are natural, inevitable, and fixed. Nonetheless, some feminists and minorities appropriate essentialism for their own group(s)—at least temporarily—for political purposes. Strategic essentialism, Gayatri Spivak’s term from her 1985 study, can devolve into an embrace of essentialism, with the argument that essential differences are deserving of celebration. Other theorists, while recognizing many of the problems of essentialism characterized above, have proposed that at least some tenets of essentialism (e.g., that categories may have an underlying basis) are rooted in real-world structure.

However, criticisms of essentialism extend to biological species as well. In the case of biological species, essentialism implies that each species is fixed and immutable, thus leading Ernst Mayr to note, “It took more than two thousand years for biology, under the influence of Darwin, to escape the paralyzing grip of essentialism” (1982, p. 87). An additional concern, for biological as well as social categories, is that essentialism assumes that the essence is a property of each individual organism. In contrast, according to evolutionary theory, species cannot be characterized in terms of properties of individual members but rather in terms of properties of the population. Elliott Sober (1994) distinguishes between “constituent definitions” (in which groups are defined in terms of characteristics of the individual organisms that make up the group) and “population thinking” (in which groups need to be understood in terms of characteristics of the larger group; e.g., interbreeding populations, in the case of species). Sober suggests there is no essence for biological species—let alone groupings of people, such as races—at a surface level or even at a genetic level.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM

Some psychologists, such as Susan A. Gelman in her 2003 book and Douglas Medin in his 1989 article, have proposed that (causal) essentialism is a cognitive bias (psychological essentialism ) found cross-culturally and even in early childhood, with important implications for a range of human behaviors and judgments: category-based inductive inferences, judgments of constancy over time, and stereotyping. Psychological essentialism requires no specialized knowledge, as people may possess what Medin calls an “essence placeholder” for a category, without knowing what the essence is. Preschool children expect category members to share nonobvious similarities, even in the face of obvious dissimilarities. For example, on learning that an atypical exemplar is a member of a category (e.g., that a penguin is a bird), children and adults draw inferences from typical instances that they apply to the atypical member (e.g., they infer that penguins build nests, like other birds). Young children judge nonvisible internal parts to be especially crucial to the identity and functioning of an item. Children also treat category membership as stable and unchanging over transformations such as costumes, growth, metamorphosis, or changing environmental conditions. Therefore, essentialism as a theoretical construct may emerge from fundamental psychological predispositions.

SEE ALSO Blackness; Cultural Studies; Darwin, Charles; Gender; Groups; Identity; Intergroup Relations; Meaning; Race; Sexual Orientation, Determinants of; Sexual Orientation, Social and Economic Consequences; Social Science; Stereotypes; Whiteness

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. 1924. Metaphysics. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon.

Barth, Fredrik, ed. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston: Little Brown.

Downs, Laura Lee. 1993. If “Woman” Is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Comparative Studies in Society and History 35: 414-437.

Gelman, Susan A. 2003. The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought. Oxford, U.K., and New York: Oxford University Press.

Irvine, Judith, and Susan Gal. 2000. Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity, 35-83. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Jensen, Arthur R. 1969. How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement? Harvard Educational Review 33: 1-123.

Mayr, Ernst. 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Medin, Douglas. 1989. Concepts and Conceptual Structure. American Psychologist 44: 1469-1481.

Sober, Elliott. 1994. From a Biological Point of View: Essays in Evolutionary Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Spivak, Gayatri. 1985. Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography. In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society IV, ed. Ranajit Guha, 330-363. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Strevens, Michael. 2000. The Essentialist Aspect of Naive Theories. Cognition 74: 149-175.

Templeton, Alan R. 1998. Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective. American Anthropologist 100: 632-650.

Susan A. Gelman
Bruce Mannheim

essentialism A philosophical term which has been used in a variety of ways. According to Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations, 1969), essentialists make the twin claims that it is possible to establish definitively the truth of a scientific theory, and that scientists can arrive at complete explanations by discovering the essence or reality that lies behind the appearance of a phenomenon. However, the term is also applied to the theory of descriptions which states that definitions are descriptions of the essential properties of things, and that one can evaluate attempts at definitions in terms of the falsity or truth of the descriptions given by them. From this point of view, science requires the discovery of such essences, and thus of correct definitions. The contemporary usage of the term is largely pejorative, since most philosophers of science accept that descriptions and knowledge are provisional, and that facts (like truth and reality) are always conceptualized in terms which are informed by theory. See also CONVENTIONALISM; RELATIVISM.