Some experimental studies have recently claimed to undermine semantic externalism about natural kind terms. However, it is unclear how philosophical accounts of reference can be experimentally tested. We present two externalistic adaptations of psychological placeholder essentialism, a strict externalist and a hybrid externalist view, which are experimentally testable. We examine Braisby, Franks, and Hampton's (1996) study which claims to undermine externalism, and argue that the study fails in its aims. We conducted two experiments, the results of which undermine internalism and (...) the hybrid theory, and support strict externalism. Our conclusion is that lay speakers' natural kind concepts involve a belief in an external category essence, which determines reference. (shrink)

Some experimental studies have recently claimed to undermine semantic externalism about natural kind terms. However, it is unclear how philosophical accounts of reference can be experimentally tested. We present two externalistic adaptations of psychological placeholder essentialism, a strict externalist and a hybrid externalist view, which are experimentally testable. We examine Braisby’s et al. (1996) study which claims to undermine externalism, and argue that the study fails in its aims. We conducted two experiments, the results of which undermine internalism and the (...) hybrid theory, and support strict externalism. Ourconclusion is that lay speakers’ natural kind concepts involve a belief in an external category essence, which determines reference. (shrink)

A large body of existing research suggests that people think very differently about categories that are seen as kinds (e.g., women) and categories that are not seen as kinds (e.g., people hanging out in the park right now). Drawing on work in linguistics, we suggest that people represent these two sorts of categories using fundamentally different representational formats. Categories that are not seen as kinds are simply represented as collections of individuals. By contrast, when it comes to kinds, people have (...) two distinct representations: a representation of a collection of individual people and a representation of the kind itself. The distinction between these two representational formats helps to shed light on otherwise puzzling findings about stereotyping and essentialism. Stereotyping appears to involve a representation of a collection of people, while essentialism involves a representation of a kind itself. (shrink)

How do essentialist beliefs about categories arise? We hypothesize that such beliefs are transmitted via language. We subject large language models (LLMs) to vignettes from the literature on essentialist categorization and find that they align well with people when the studies manipulated teleological information -- information about what something is for. We examine whether in a classic test of essentialist categorization -- the transformation task -- LLMs prioritize teleological properties over information about what something looks (...) like, or is made of. Experiments 1 and 2 find that telos and what something is made of matter more than appearance. Experiment 3 manipulates all three factors and finds that what something is for matters more than what it's made of. Overall, these studies suggest that language alone may be sufficient to give rise to essentialist beliefs, and that information about what something is for matters more. (shrink)

In ordinary language, in the medical sciences, and in the overlap between them, we frequently make claims which imply that we might have had different gametic origins from the ones we actually have. Such statements seem intuitively true and coherent. But they counterfactually ascribe different DNA to their referents and therefore contradict material-origin essentialism, which Kripke and his followers argue is intuitively obvious. In this paper I argue, using examples from ordinary language and from philosophy of medicine and (...) bioethics, that statements which attribute alternative material origins to their referents are useful, common in political and medical reasoning, and in many cases best interpreted literally. So we must replace the doctrine of material-origin essentialism with one that can make sense of ordinary discourse and the language of the medical sciences. I propose an anti-essentialist account of such counterfactuals according to which individuals’ modal properties are relative to a given inquiry. (shrink)

Much recent discussion has focused on the nature of artifacts, particularly on whether artifacts have essences. While the general consensus is that artifacts are at least intention-dependent, an equally common view is function essentialism about artifacts, the view that artifacts are essentially functional objects and that membership in an artifact kind is determined by a particular, shared function. This paper argues that function essentialism about artifacts is false. First, the two component conditions of function essentialism are given a clear and (...) precise formulation, after which counterexamples are offered to each. Second, ways to handle the counterexamples suggested by Randall Dipert and Simon Evnine are considered and rejected. Third, I then consider the prospects for restricting function essentialism to so-called technical artifacts, as Lynne Baker does, and argue that this, too, fails. This paper thereby consolidates the scattered literature on function essentialism and shows that, despite the seeming plausibility of the thesis, it should be rejected as an account of artifact essences. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss and evaluate different arguments for the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. I conclude that essentialist arguments from the nature of natural kinds fail to establish that essences are ontologically more basic than laws, and fail to offer an a priori argument for the necessity of all causal laws. Similar considerations carry across to the argument from the dispositionalist view of properties, which may end up placing unreasonable constraints on property identity (...) across possible worlds. None of my arguments preclude the possibility that the laws may turn out to be metaphysically necessary after all, but I argue that this can only be established by a posteriori scientific investigation. I therefore argue for what may seem to be a surprising conclusion: that a fundamental metaphysical question – the modal status of laws of nature – depends on empirical facts rather than purely on a priori reasoning. (shrink)

The term 'essentialism' in its popular usage is usually qualified in some way, as in 'biological essentialism', 'gender essentialism' and 'social essentialism'. The essentialist theses were defended on the grounds that denying them leads, under plausible assumptions, to pairs of worlds containing objects which are intrinsic and spatio‐temporal duplicates and yet which are numerically distinct. This chapter outlines some technical difficulties in getting the definitions of 'essential property' and 'individual essence' exactly right. It explains the idea of a metaphysically (...) essential property in terms of Aristotle's 'essential/accidental' contrast. A popular idea is to invoke the notion, which has its roots in Aristotle's theory of essence and accident, of a substance sortal. A different way of developing a sortal‐based account of essential kinds is suggested by David Wiggins, who argues that it is only ultimate sortals that represent essential properties, where an ultimate sortal is the most general sortal corresponding to a given principle of individuation. (shrink)

Talk of “essences” has, since Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, gained significant currency in contemporary philosophy. It is no longer unfashionable to talk about the essence of this or that (natural) kind, and as such we now find a variety of brands of essentialism on the market including B.D. Ellis’s scientific essentialism, David Oderberg’s real Essentialism, Alexander Bird’s dispositional essentialism, and the contemporary essentialism of Kripke and Putnam. -/- Almost all these brands of essentialism share a particular gloss on Locke’s (...) famous objection to Aristotle that natural kinds are demarcated by nominal essences not real essences. Thus Oderberg claims that ‘Empiricists take [real] essences to be paradigmatically unobservable’ and that this ‘objection goes back at least to John Locke’ (Oderberg 2007: 21). Bird, presenting his dispositional essentialism, defines a notion of “being” as ‘the reverse of Locke’s definition of essence’ which he takes to be ‘the being of any thing, whereby it is what it is’ (Bird 2007: 100). Joseph LaPorte, discussing nominal and real essences, claims that ‘Kripke and Putnam seem to affirm something more substantive: that biological kinds have “real essences” in Locke’s terminology’ (LaPorte 2004: 49). Even avowed anti-essentialists such as John Dupré sanction the standard criticism of Locke that his scepticism about the knowability of real essences was ‘premature’, and claim that ‘genuine natural kinds provide the extensions of many terms of natural language, where these natural kinds are determined by true Lockean real essences’ (Dupré 1993: 22). -/- All of these essentialisms (even Dupré’s anti-essentialism) are wrong about Locke. Oderberg is wrong to claim that Locke thought that real essences were paradigmatically unobservable; Bird is wrong to think that Locke’s notion of essence is the being of anything whereby it is what it is; LaPorte is wrong to think that Kripke and Putnam are talking about Lockean real essences (although so are Kripke and Putnam); and Dupré is wrong to think that genuine natural kinds (if by genuine he means objective or mind-independent) are determined but true Lockean real essences . -/- The mistake stems from a standard, but ultimately incorrect, interpretation of Locke’s discussion of essences in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . This mistaken interpretation (Lowe 1995, 2006, Von Leyden 1973, Wiggins 1974) takes Locke to mean, by “real essence”, the Aristotelian notion i.e. ‘the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is’ (Essay III.iii.15), and interprets his objection as epistemological: we cannot come to know what real essences are, and therefore they cannot figure in our classifications of things into kinds. -/- This paper will present and defend the following two claims: i) that Locke’s notion of “real essence” is not the Aristotelian notion, and ii) that Locke’s objection to the Aristotelian notion was not merely epistemological. The first claim can be defended by presenting and applying Vienne’s (1993) terminological revision. Vienne argues that Locke did not introduce a dichotomy between real and nominal essence, but a trichotomy between real essence, nominal essence and real constitution. This terminological revision will be employed to highlight where ambiguous uses of the phrase “real essence” have caused some serious misunderstandings of Locke’s philosophy. The second claim (steering Locke around what is the classic objection to his thesis) can be defended by presenting a novel way of splitting up Locke’s objections to the Aristotelian notion of essence. The analysis will show that Locke’s anti-essentialism is still in good shape, and of contemporary significance. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the (...) possibility that some apparently substantive definitional disputes may turn out to be verbal or conceptual, since this pluralist strategy, in our view, requires a commitment to more, rather than fewer, essences. What is more, a deflationary, metaphysically ‘light-weight’ construal of the essence-ascriptions in question leads to a peculiar conception of the pursuit of metaphysicians as behaving like deceptive (or self-deceived) grammarians pretending to be scientists. Moreover, this deflationary attitude, we argue, spreads beyond metaphysics and philosophy more broadly to apparently substantive definitional disputes in the sciences as well as other in other disciplines, such as art criticism. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to show that pornography dehumanizes women through essentialization. First, I argue that certain acts of subject-essentialization are acts of subject-dehumanization. Second, I demonstrate, by reviewing evidence about the linguistic material that we find in and around pornography, that pornography systematically deploys content that essentializes women in the ways identified as problematic. It follows that pornography dehumanizes women.

Psychological essentialism is a prominent view within contemporary developmental psychology and cognitive science according to which children have an innate commitment to essentialism. If this view is correct then a commitment to essentialism is an important aspect of human nature rather than a culturally specific commitment peculiar to those who have received a specific philosophical or scientific education. In this article my concern is to explore the philosophical significance of psychological essentialism with respect to the relationship between the content of (...) our concepts and thoughts and the nature of the extra-cranial world. I will argue that, despite first appearances, psychological essentialism undermines a form of externalism that has become commonplace in the philosophy of mind and language. (shrink)

After tracing the recent decline in explicitly essentialistic theories, Hallett (Dean of the College of Philosophy and letters, St. Louis U.) critically surveys the essentialism still strongly operative in much philosophical reasoning, then ...

Two related claims have lately garnered currency: dispositional essentialism—the view that some or all properties, or some or all fundamental properties, are essentially dispositional; and the claim that laws of nature (or again, many or the fundamental ones) are metaphysically necessary. I have argued elsewhere (On the metaphysical contingency of laws of nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002) that the laws of nature do not have a mind-independent metaphysical necessity, but recent developments on dispositions have given these ideas a new (...) vibrancy and made them the topic of more focused discussion. So I would like to revisit this, arguing that the new work, as interesting and important as it is to our understanding of fundamental properties, powers and dispositions, should not change our minds about metaphysical necessity. One should still think necessity is conceptually or conventionally grounded. I do not argue that laws of nature are not necessary, nor that properties do not have dispositional essences, but only that if these are the case, then, like other de re or empirical necessities, they have no metaphysical weight and are based in our rules or decisions about how to talk about the world. We may have excellent reasons to talk and think in this way—but these reasons do not include, require or provide evidence of mind-independent metaphysical necessity or essences. (shrink)

Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators (...) ought to attend to the propensities for our representational devices to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, psychological essentialism has been an important topic of study, incorporating research from multiple areas of psychology, philosophy and linguistics. At its most basic level, essentialism is the tendency to represent certain concepts in terms of a deeper, unobservable property that is responsible for category membership. Originally, this concept was used to understand people’s reasoning about natural kind concepts, such as TIGER and WATER, but more recently, researchers have identified the emergence of essentialist-like intuitions in (...) a number of other contexts, including people’s representation of concepts like SCIENTIST or CHRISTIAN. This paper develops an account that aims to capture how essentialism may operate across these varied cases. In short, we argue that while there is diversity in the forms essentialism can take, these varied cases reflect the same underlying cognitive structure. (shrink)

There has been a long-standing opposition to genetically modified organisms worldwide. Some studies have tried to identify the deep-lying philosophical, conceptual as well as psychological motivations for this opposition. Philosophical essentialism, psychological essentialism, and vitalism have been proposed as possible candidates. I approach the plausibility of the claim that these notions are related to GMO opposition from a historical perspective. Vitalism and philosophical essentialism have been associated with anti-GMO stance on account of their purported hostility to species and organismic mutability. (...) I show that vitalism has often been associated to various mutabilist theories, whereas the case for philosophical essentialism as motivating GMO opposition depends on the now discredited Essentialism Story that had constructed essentialism as a predominant view in pre-Darwinian science. Further, as philosophical essentialism taken seriously is incompatible with the reality of genetic engineering, it is unlikely to be a reason for opposition. Psychological essentialism, involving an instinctive repulsion from the practice of manipulating what is thought to be the essence of living beings, is a more likely reason for resistance to transgenesis. Yet even here, historical considerations are crucial. Not only lay people tend to essentialize genes, but scientists themselves can be shown to have been complicit in essentialist tendencies. From the advent of modern genetics, the imagery of the all-powerful genes, often depicted by scientists themselves metaphorically as material counterparts of the now obsolete vitalistic agent, has permeated the language of leading scientific figures, whose influence in shaping public opinion should not be downplayed. Enthusiasm for genetic engineering and the abhorrence from it might both derive from the same unrealistic image of the essential gene, the revision of which thus holding out the hope for transcending the present impasse of the GMO controversy. (shrink)

This article explores the theory of natural kind essentialism, as developed by Putnam and Kripke. It defends the theory against certain criticisms, but also suggests that it should not be treated as universally true. Rather, it comes down to how different people use language, offering reasons why some people's idiolects might behave in an essentialist way while others behave in the contrary way, but explaining how we can all still communicate perfectly well despite this.

The recognition that contentful universals are rare and often does not undermine the fact that most non-universal but recurring patterns of language are amenable to explanation. These patterns are sensical or motivated solutions to interacting and often conflicting factors. As implied by the Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) article, linguistics would be well served to move beyond the essentialist bias that seeks universal, innate, unchanging categories with rigid boundaries.

This chapter explores Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s views on language and knowledge, establishing a philosophical dialogue between two different positions, which are based on a similar anti-essentialist and instrumentalist concern. The chapter will first focus on Nietzsche’s conception of language as the expression of valuational perspectives developing through the natural and cultural history of mankind. It will then consider Wittgenstein’s account of language as the inherited background of our practical engagement with the world. Finally, by bringing Nietzsche’s (...) and Wittgenstein’s views together, the last section reflects on the crucial strategic move they make in their respective battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. -/- . (shrink)

Theoretical identity statements of the form "water is H2O‟ are allegedly necessary truths knowable a posteriori, and assert that nothing could be water and not be H2O. The necessary a posteriori nature of these identity claims has been taken by Kripke, Putnam and Donnellan to justify a move from talk of reference (language) to talk of essence (metaphysics), and has motivated much of contemporary essentialism. In this paper I will contest this move from reference to essence, and argue that (...) (i.) the only way to derive essentialism from semantics (specifically direct reference) is to assume it as a premise, (ii.) that contemporary essentialism is a metaphysical assumption not a thesis, and (iii.) – assuming the accuracy of the analogy between proper names and natural kind terms – present an alternative version of natural kinds classification that is interest-relative, dependent on practical application and reflects the contingent state of affairs which is our world. (shrink)

To borrow a phrase from Galileo: What does it mean that the story of the creation is "written in the language of mathematics?" This book is an attempt to understand the natural world, its consistency, and the ontology of what we call laws of nature, with a special focus on their mathematical expression. It does this by arguing in favor of the Essentialist interpretation over that of the Humean and Anti-Humean accounts. It re-examines and critiques Descartes' notion of (...) laws of nature following from God's activity in the world as mover of extended bodies, as well as Hume's arguments against causality and induction. It then presents an Aristotelian-Thomistic account of laws of nature based on mathematical abstraction, necessity, and teleology, finally offering a definition for laws of nature within this framework. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Matter and Mathematics: An Essentialist Account of the Laws of Nature by Andrew YOUNANDominic V. CassellaYOUNAN, Andrew. Matter and Mathematics: An Essentialist Account of the Laws of Nature. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. xii + 228 pp. Cloth, $75.00Andrew Younan’s work situates itself between two opposing philosophical accounts of the laws of nature. In one corner, there are the Humeans (or Nominalists); (...) in the other, the Anti-Humeans (or Platonists). The goal of the book is to find an explanation for the orderliness of the natural world that avoids falling into the difficulties of the two opposing philosophies. For example, the Humeans treat “events” as fundamental, and the laws of nature follow from these “events.” For the Humeans, reality is essentially random, with any order being something of our own contrivance. Whereas for the Anti-Humeans, the laws of nature are fundamental and are treated as causing events, turning the effect of necessity into the cause of material [End Page 166] characteristics. Looking to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Younan proposes the recovery of a third option, the Essentialist position. This Essentialist position understands substances, that is, individual beings, as fundamental and all else (for example, events and laws of nature) follow from these individual beings. The thesis of the book, generally understood, is that Essentialism evades the critiques that the Humeans and Anti-Humeans put against one another while retaining what is right in each approach.The book is divided into two parts. The book’s first part deals with general objections and replies and is divided into three chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 address the two opposing accounts of nature mentioned, while chapter 3 argues for the benefits of recovering an Essentialist position. Chapter 1 examines the objection that Aristotelian natural philosophy is incompatible with modern science, an objection raised by Descartes. Chapter 2 addresses the objections of the Humeans, namely, that natural philosophy and, with it, causality and induction have been debunked. Chapter 3 looks at the fathers of quantum theory, specifically Heisenberg, and argues that a return to Aristotle’s understanding of nature would benefit the modern scientific project. The book’s second part is an argument for the Essentialist position and is divided into three chapters. Chapters 4 and 5 are the foundation for chapter 6. Chapter 4 is an abstractive account of mathematics, differing from Descartes and his conceptions, which draws on the texts of Aristotle and Aquinas’s Division and Methods. Chapter 5 situates necessity and its role in Aristotelian natural philosophy. Chapter 6 is the author’s attempt at defining what it is to be a law of nature.Younan argues that adopting an essentialist understanding of nature in a system where all knowledge begins in the senses has three significant “payoffs.” The first is that it avoids governance language, that is, it avoids making laws themselves causes of necessity; the second is that it avoids the assertion of a priori knowledge; the third is that it understands individual things as the fundamental primitives in nature, restoring the substance to its proper place as the thing that “stands under” accidental being.The book is concluded with an appendix that explores and rearticulates Thomas Aquinas’s fifth way under the consideration of everything the author had argued for in the book’s main text. Taking as established by the rest of the book that necessity and teleology go hand in hand, Younan argues for a creator God who establishes a universe freely but within certain parameters that follow upon being itself. Younan concludes, with Thomas Aquinas, that laws of nature are “ordinances of reason” that must come from a rational mind. To be as consistent as they are, the laws of nature must be promulgated by God, and they are discoverable within the nature of matter itself.Younan’s book often engages its interlocutors on the big-picture scale, frequently giving generalizations and not going into details to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds. The author is very aware of what he is doing. [End Page 167] It is appropriate since engaging the multiheaded hydra of the schools of thought that Younan... (shrink)

This book about philosophy of medicine bestows a bottom-up and not a top-down approach. It starts from clinical medicine and epidemiology, analyzing their interrelations with philosophical instruments. The book criticizes the constant search for generalities and the essentialism that too often characterizes this discipline, which results in philosophers of medicine dialoguing with each other without direct contact with medical science. In the light of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, this book proposes an approach to the philosophy of medicine based on the quorum (...) of language, what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances. In this way the author establishes a philosophy of medicine that is closely related to the medical clinic and to public health and as such avoids armchair philosophy. “Don’t think, but look", wrote Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This book celebrates the many important contributions to philosophy by one of the leading philosophers in the analytic field, Michael Devitt. It collects seventeen original essays by renowned philosophers from all over the world. They all develop themes from Devitt’s work, thus discussing many fundamental issues in philosophy of linguistics, theory of reference, theory of meaning, methodology, and metaphysics. In a long final chapter, Devitt himself replies to the contributors. In so doing, he further elaborates his views on various of (...) these issues, for example defending his claim (in opposition to Chomskyan orthodoxy) that languages are external rather than internal; his well-known causal theory of reference; his “shocking” idea that meanings can be causal, non-descriptive, modes of presentation; his methodological naturalism; his commitment to scientific realism; and his version of biological essentialism. The volume will appeal to all scholars and students interested in contemporary theoretical analytic philosophy, and will be a must-read for any serious researcher in philosophy of language. It provides a deep insight into the work of one of the most important living philosophers, and will help readers to better understand language and reality from a naturalistic perspective. (shrink)

The paper examines the impact of the idea of falsification in Karl Popper’s philosophy of science to rhetorical and political discussion. The structure of language is considered as revealing an inescapable means of falsification. After criticizing the rhetorical tradition that goes way back to Platonic and Aristotelian essentialism, the paper concludes that critical negativity committed to solving social issues should be at the core of rhetorical interaction in any democracy. Falsification and not social unanimity is what empowers democratic practices.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have attempted to save the concept of ?hegemony? from its economistic and essentialist Marxist roots by incorporating the linguistic influences of post?structuralist theory. Their major Marxist detractors criticise their trajectory as a ?descent into discourse? ? a decay from well?grounded, material reality into the idealistic and problematic realm of language and discourse. Both sides of the debate seem to agree on one thing: the line from Marxism to post?Marxism is the line from the (...) economy to language, from ?reality? to discourse. This article focuses on Gramsci?s writings on language to argue against both sides of this debate. It illustrates how language is central to Gramsci?s historical materialism and that he does not oppose it to materiality. It argues that Gramsci adopted the very term hegemony substantially from his university studies in linguistics ? the debates from which Ferdinand de Saussure also developed structuralism. For Gramsci, such linguistic issues were directly related to the ?questione della lingua? and Italian unification. Moreover, language lies at the centre of Gramsci?s understanding of the relationship between coercion and consent. This not only troubles Laclau & Mouffe?s reading of Gramsci, but it illuminates a more productive conception of hegemony that can address recent debates around post?structuralism and the use of ?hegemony? to analyse globalisation and an increasingly technological and electronic world. (shrink)

The term “science” is a common noun that is used to designate a whole range of activities. If Reeves is right—and I think he is—that there is no essence to these activities that allows them to be objectively identified and demarcated from nonscience, then what qualifies as science is determined by communities. It becomes much more difficult on this antiessentialism position to identify and dismiss pseudo‐science. I suggest we might find a way forward, though, by engaging a philosophical tradition that (...) has largely been neglected in English‐speaking science and religion studies, and by articulating a theory of consensus along the lines of Oreskes (2019). (shrink)

Whereas Mereological Essentialism is the thesis that the parts of an object are essential to it, Reverse Mereological Essentialism is the thesis that the whole is essential to its parts. Specifically—since RME is an Aristotelian doctrine—it is a claim not about objects in general but about substances. Here I set out and explain RME as it should be understood from the perspective of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, as well as proposing a kind of master argument for believing it. A number of (...) objections (many of which have been raised by Kathrin Koslicki or Robert Koons) are then considered, the replies to which help further to clarify and motivate RME. The final section considers some important questions concerning parts and matter in light of Ross Inman’s recent defence of RME under the guise of what he calls Substantial Priority. Considering these questions further illustrates right and wrong ways of understanding RME. Overall, the case for Reverse Mereological Essentialism is strong albeit with a number of difficulties that need to be resolved through further investigation. (shrink)

De re modality is eliminable if there is an effective translation of all wffs into non-de re equivalents. We cannot have logical equivalence unless 'logic' has odd theses, but we can have material equivalence by banning all essences, something the nonde re facts let us do, or by giving everything such humdrum essences as self-identity and banning the more interesting ones. Eliminability cannot be got from weaker assumptions, nor independent ones of even modest generality. The net philosophical import is that, (...) quite apart from the merits of essentialism, de re language has scant utility. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that (...) ambiguity plays in influencing responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the role of labels and generics referring to social kinds in mindshaping practices, arguing that they promote generalizations that foster essentialist thinking and carry a normative force. We propose that their cognitive function consists in both contributing to the formation and reinforcement of schemata and scripts for social interaction and in activating these schemata in specific social situations. Moreover, we suggest that failure to meet the expectations engendered by these schemata and scripts leads to (...) the activation of “reactive attitudes” embedded in feedback loops of reactive exchange that are constitutive of our mindshaping practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as " (...) class='Hi'>essentialist."2 Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. It argues that philosophical claims are bound to language, and yet philosophy’sclaim to objective clarity is meaningless if language is radically perspectival. The paper attempts to show the limitations and possibilities that Platonic dialectics and Derridean deconstruction share in their respective approaches to the analysis of language and the relationship between speech and writing. The paper concludes that language is ambiguous, neither reducible to the relativism (...) of sophistry nor to the essentialism of metaphysics. Against Derrida, the paper argues that without structure, voice is not language; it renders only inarticulate sounds. Yet in speaking, this structural aspect gets taken for granted and passed over. Only when language is established in writing is the possibility of voice first recognized. (shrink)

I look at a recent argument offered in defense of a doctrine which I will call generalized scientific essentialism. This is the doctrine according to which, not only are some facts about substance composition metaphysically necessary, but, in addition, some facts about substance behavior are metaphysically necessary. More specifically, so goes the argument, not only is water necessarily composed of H2O and salt is necessarily composed of NaCl, but, in addition, salt necessarily dissolves in water. If this argument is sound, (...) and if the statement that necessarily salt dissolves in water is a statement of a law of nature, then one conclusion of the argument is that there is at least one metaphysically necessary law of nature. My paper examines the extent to which this kind of argument could be generalized to provide a case for a full-blown scientific essentialism: the doctrine according to which all of the laws of nature are necessary. Or, in terms of dispositions, it is the doctrine according to which natural kinds have all of their powers, capacities and propensities as a matter of necessity. (shrink)

Maternal gift-giving sustains life and creates positive human relations. Addressing important issues in the theory of language and communication, Genevieve Vaughan associates language and mothering to the free gift economy. A fundamental hypothesis is that maternal gift-giving, mothering/being-mothered forms a non-essentialist, but fundamental core process of material and verbal communication that has been neglected by the Western view of the world. The mothering/being-mothered paradigm is thematized in the framework of gift logic, which is otherness logic. Restoring such (...) a paradigm offers a new light on language, communication and human relations, contributing to recovery of the “properly human” in terms of gift economy values, ultimately to the end of affecting social praxis for radical social change and creating better worlds. The second part of this text is titled “For the Sake of the Other” and presents an exchange of ideas with Vaughan in the form of a written conversation. This text is structured around the following titles: 1. Otherness and Gifting as the Basis of Communication: 1.1. Semiosis, Language, and the Gift Economy; 1.2. The Gift of Speaking and the “Mother Work Schema”; 1.3. Material gifting, Verbal Nurturing, Imagination; 1.4. New Perspectives for Studies in Language and Communication; 2. For the Sake of the Other, with Genevieve Vaughan. (shrink)

A rejection of the notion of substance, an emphasis on intraworldly experience and an incorporation of ideas from modern biology are just three of the distinctive features of Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics or philosophy of organism. The last two features give his scheme a heavily naturalistic tinge, despite his positing of eternal objects or universal forms of definiteness, which - together with subjective aims or final causes - are instantiated in a divinity prior to worldly realization.1 Such a naturalism (...) might seem to preclude largely a comparison with the work of Jacques Derrida, with other differences between the two being left aside. Derrida began his career as a student of phenomenology and structuralism, and by far the greater number of his philosophical writings has been devoted to thinkers who are explicitly post-Kantian. Yet this does not mean that he is a transcendental philosopher who abandons experience and the empirical world in favour of language and consciousness. In this paper I argue that Derrida’s work - which has been shown to be heavily informed by systems theory and evolutionary biology - is not in fact shut off from the extra-conscious and extra-linguistic dimensions of actuality. I also suggest that his deconstructive approach is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s in rejecting essentialism, namely, the idea of fixed and determined essences that underlie accidental properties and changes. From a Derridean perspective, one might even see Whitehead’s alternative as insufficiently radical, since it seems to posit not just eternal objects and God, but a cosmology in which the most fundamental beings or “actual entities” undergo no essential changes or mutations in their respective histories. It is arguable, however, that the latter conclusion would only be consequent on a restrictive interpretation of the pathways of process possible in Whitehead’s metaphysics.. (shrink)

Linguistics is important. An understanding of linguistic principles is as essential to the layperson as it is to the language scholar. Using concrete examples from politics, law, and education, this book shows how people misconceive language every day and what the consequences of misconceptions can be. Since the meanings of words are often fuzzy at best, this volume argues for a flexible approach to meaning and definitions, and demonstrates how this approach can help us understand many conflicts. It (...) is an alternative way of viewing and doing sociolinguistics. Language Misconceived: Arguing for Applied Cognitive Sociolinguistics offers many specific suggestions and guidelines for approaching a linguistic project. The ideas expressed in this book have been class tested for several years. Students enthusiastically appreciate the connections drawn between linguistics and real-life problems. The goal is to help students of sociolinguistics avoid pitfalls that may inhibit research. Language Misconceived: Arguing for Applied Cognitive Sociolinguistics is intended primarily for graduate and Ph.D. students of linguistics, especially those interested in applying linguistics to fields like politics, law, and education. It may also be recommended to seasoned linguists as well as researchers in communication, sociology, psychology, and education. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The main part of the thesis concerns how things, in the sense of individuals, might have been. The topic is what limits there are on the counterfactual possibilities for individuals: in other words, what essential properties, if any, they have. ;In Chapters 3-6 three answers to this question that have been given in recent philosophical literature are examined. They are: that each thing has a unique individual essence ; (...) that there are features of the origin of an individual without which it could not possibly have existed ; and, finally, that there are sortal concepts that represent essential properties of the things that fall under them . ;All of these answers, and many of the arguments that have been given for them, are criticised. Sometimes the criticism takes the form of pointing to unpalatable consequences that result from the acceptance of the doctrine in question. Sometimes the criticism consists in pointing to difficulties or inadequacies in the arguments that have been presented in its favour. ;A preliminary chapter prepares the ground by setting out the conceptual framework, and the chief formal characteristics, of the essentialism discussed in the later chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the nature of necessary a posteriori truth, touching on questions in the philosophy of language and mind concerning the notion of de re thought. ;It is argued that essentialism about natural kinds raises problems of its own: some of these are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Here the main topic is the connection between semantic theory and natural kind essentialism. Concluding that the essentialism should be regarded as in an important sense independent of semantic theory, the chapters add to, and also criticise, the work of other writers who have reached the same verdict. Scepticism is also expressed about the independent plausibility of natural kind essentialism. ;Recent interest in essentialism owes its genesis chiefly to the work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam: these figures stand in the background throughout the discussion. Among the other writers whose work is discussed are Baruch Brody, Gareth Evans, Graeme Forbes, Colin McGinn, J. L. Mackie, D. H. Mellor, Nathan Salmon, and David Wiggins. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as " (...) class='Hi'>essentialist."2 Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

This dissertation defends the view that concepts encode causal information and, for the first time, applies this view to a range of topics in the philosophy of language and social philosophy. In my first chapter (“Cognitive Essentialism and the Structure of Concepts”), I survey the current empirical and theoretical literature on causal-essentialist theories of concepts. In my second chapter (“Meaning Externalism and Causal Model Theory”), I propose an account of natural kind concepts according to which they encode statistical (...) information of features of a natural kind, and represents these features as causally related to each other. I show that this internalist model of concepts correctly predicts intuitions about Putnam’s twin earth scenario and Kripke’s conceivability cases that historically motivated philosophers of language to accept externalist accounts of meaning. The defended theory of concepts also informs topics that go beyond traditional issues in philosophy of language. In my third chapter (“An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs”), I defend the view that slurs are, too, a species of kind terms: slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. This explains both the peculiar linguistic behavior of slurs and slurs’ dehumanizing effects. In my fourth chapter, I build on this insight, showing that the explicit language in and around pornography depicts women as ‘kinds’ or ‘breeds’ that are naturally made to enjoy certain sexual acts, and argue that this deterministic picture of women dehumanizes them. (shrink)

Kripke holds the thesis that identity statements containing natural kind terms are if true, necessarily true; these statements can be denominated theoretical identities. Kripke alleges that the necessity of theoretical identities grounds on the linguistic feature that natural kind terms are rigid designators. Nevertheless, I argue that the conception of natural kind terms as rigid designators, in one of their most natural views, hinders the establishment of the truth of theoretical identities and thus of their necessity. However, in Kripke’s works (...) another proposal, not linguistic but metaphysical, is found to justify the presumed necessity of theoretical identities; it grounds on essentialism concerning natural kinds. In this regard, I question some of Kripke’s main claims, focusing on one of the main examples of theoretical identities put forward by Kripke, i.e., “Water is H2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$_2$$\end{document}O”. I challenge his a priori claims concerning what should be the essence of a natural kind like water. Furthermore, I adduce that the character of that theoretical identity is not that claimed by Kripke, since in the term flanking the right side of the identity sign it has to be resorted to the notion of similarity or it should have the form of a disjunction of a cluster of substances. (shrink)

This article explains how li 禮 or ‘ritual propriety’ is the ‘body language’ of ren 仁 or the authentic expression of our humanity. Li and ren are interdependent aspects of a larger creative human way (rendao 仁道) that can be conceptually distinguished as follows: li refers to the ritualized social form of appropriate conduct and ren to the more general, authentically human spirit this expresses. Li is the social instrument for self-cultivation and the vehicle of harmonious human interaction. More, (...) li must mean something that is effectively communicated to others for an authentic, human (ren) interaction to occur. Li is the body language of ren in being the ritual vehicle for its’ expression; however, li is underdetermined by ren and so must be distinguished from it in on further grounds: authentic human activity must not just be equivocated with social convention because conclusively establishing whether a particular action is li (or is a truly ren action) is impossible. As a result, li is often confused with social power and privilege that is easier to empirically identify than ren conduct is, but this is a mistake since li has to express ren or it is not li at all. The inescapable ambiguity of li – an ambiguity that attaches to any language – can be critiqued by the Western view that sees something ‘essential’ to the ‘self,’ and that makes one a ‘self’ in and of oneself and not in a way that depends on others. I show that such Western individualism – while resting on a fundamentally different way of thinking of being a person and living a good life – does not reduce Confucian ritual to being an instrument for social discrimination and subordination. My argument is indebted to twentieth-century philosophy of language in the West that offered the idea that some words are actions. (shrink)

Roger Vergauwen seeks to provide an answer to the question, "How does language connect to the world?" He begins with the recent developments in formal semantics and from them constructs his own 'theory of reference' with which he considers the nature of the correspondence of the world. The author locates his metalogics between the philosophy of language and epistemology while he covers a range of models from Plato to Wittgenstein. Vergauwen assumes no previous technical or logical study. Contents: (...) Introduction: The Temperature of a Hot Topic; The Tarski Program: Hijacking the Truth about Reference; Reference and Theory of Reference; Inside Out: Reference and Metalogic; Outline of a Logic with Non-Standard Meanings. (shrink)

This book shows that philosophers and linguists of quite different brands have tended to give undue priority to their own favorite theoretical framework, and have presupposed that the descriptive scheme invoked by that framework constitutes a pattern to which any linguistic practice somehow has to conform. United by a critical attitude towards such essentialist aspirations, the authors collectively manage to cast doubt on the very attempt to fit the whole of linguistic practice into a general theoretical mould.