The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday ThoughtEssentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as "dog," "man," or "intelligence," have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea come from? In this book, Susan Gelman argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. Gelman argues against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious, instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. She also attacks claims that children build up their knowledge of the world based on simple, associative learning strategies, arguing that children's concepts are embedded in rich folk theories. Parents don't explicitly teach children to essentialize; instead, during the preschool years, children spontaneously construct concepts and beliefs that reflect an essentialist bias. Essentialist accounts have been offered, in one form or another, for thousands of years, extending back at least to Aristotle and Plato. Yet this book is the first to address the issues surrounding essentialism from a psychological perspective. Gelman synthesizes over 15 years of empirical research on essentialism into a unified framework and explores the broader lessons that the research imparts concerning, among other things, human concepts, children's thinking, and the ways in which language influences thought. This volume will appeal to developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists, as well as to scholars in cognitive science and philosophy. |
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction | 3 |
PART I THE PHENOMENA | 19 |
PART II MECHANISMS OF ACQUISITION | 153 |
PART III IMPLICATIONS AND SPECULATIONS | 275 |
Notes | 327 |
| 335 | |
| 369 | |
| 377 | |
Other editions - View all
The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought Susan A. Gelman Limited preview - 2005 |
The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought Susan A. Gelman Limited preview - 2003 |
The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought Susan A. Gelman Limited preview - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
adults animacy animal appearance argue artifacts asked assumption Atran behavior beliefs biological birds Carey cate category e.g. category members category membership causal causes chapter chil Child Development children's concepts Coley condition construal context contrast count nouns cues culture developmental Developmental Psychology Diesendruck distinction domain-specific dren entities essen essence essentialism essentialist evidence example folk biology four-year-olds function gender gories Gutheil Heyman identity important individual inductive inferences inductive potential input insides instances internal interpretation Kalish Keil knowledge labels language learning linguistic living kinds Mandarin mean Medin Michelle Hollander mothers naming natural kinds nongeneric nonobvious properties noun phrases novel objects ontological parents participants Paul Bloom perceptual picture plural predict preschool preschool children psychological question reasoning refer sample shape similarity simply sortal sorts specific structure suggest Table target task taxonomic theory things tion traits typically universal quantifiers utterances versus vitalistic Wellman words young children