Psychological Essentialism and the Structure of Concepts

Philosophy Compass 17 (5):e12823 (2022)
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Abstract

Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in cognitive science. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind and cognitive science to social philosophy. This article aims to give philosophers who are new to the topic an overview of the key empirical findings surrounding psychological essentialism, and some of the ways the hypothesis and its related findings have been discussed, extended, and applied in philosophical research.

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Author's Profile

Eleonore Neufeld
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

References found in this work

The meaning of 'meaning'.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.
Doing without concepts.Edouard Machery - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Construction of Human Kinds.Ron Mallon - 2016 - Oxford: Oxford University Press UK.

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