Against Teleological Essentialism
نویسندگان
چکیده
In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences terms a telos, such as honey-making, not scientific essences, bee DNA. Here, I challenge their interpretation show it is directly predicted by main theory they seek to undermine. argue results can be explained instances diagnostic reasoning about essences.
منابع مشابه
Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy
The heated feminist debates over 'essentialism' of the 1980s and early 1990s have largely died away, yet they raised fundamental questions for feminist moral and political philosophy which have still to be fully explored. Centrally at issue in feminist controversies over essentialism was whether there are any shared characteristics common to all women, which unify them as a group. Many leading ...
متن کاملWhy does ingroup essentialism increase prejudice against minority members?
A study with British participants (N = 90) tested a potential mediator of the effect of essentialist beliefs about the national ingroup on prejudice against immigrants. Essentialist beliefs were defined as beliefs in genetic determinism, a basic assumption that group membership is "written in the blood" and that the groups' boundaries and characteristics are determined by genetic and/or biologi...
متن کاملDispositional essentialism
Dispositions, Mellor once remarked, are as shameful in many eyes as pregnant spinsters used to be, ' ideally to be explained away, or entitled to a shotgun wedding to take the name of some decently real categorical property' [18]. This 'Victorian prejudice' against dispositions still exists. On reflection, this fact is perhaps not really surprising. Dispositions have dallied in most corners of ...
متن کاملTopological Essentialism
This paper analyses topological variants of mereological essentialism, the thesis that an object cannot have different parts than the ones it has. In particular, we examine de dicto and de re versions of two theses: (i) that an object cannot change its external connections (e.g., adjacent objects cannot be separated), and (ii) that an object cannot change its topological genus (e.g., a doughnut...
متن کاملOrigins of Essentialism 1 on the Functional Origins of Essentialism
This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism results from a history of natural selection acting on human representation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist representational systems are especially well suited for representing natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductive potential ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Cognitive Science
سال: 2021
ISSN: ['0364-0213', '1551-6709']
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12961