Friday, October 01, 2004

Essentialist Intuitions

There seems to be a lot of talk about intuitions among analytic philosophers these days, with an entire new area of philosophy, experimental philosophy, devoted to them. The issue is whether the intuitions that drive philosophers' reasoning, be they about reference, intention, free will, or some other philosophically important construct, are universal. Testing whether non-philosophers, and members of disparate cultures, share these intuitions is a good way to find out. I'm not sure whether it's a good or bad thing that some intuitions driving philosophical analyses may not be universal, and there seems to be a lively debate about this going on. Still, I find the research very interesting, and enjoy reading it now and then.

All of the research that I have read so far focuses on intuitions that philosophers make explicit in their analyses. For instance, philosophers who are studying reference spend a lot of time constructing scenarios and consulting their intuitions to test different theories of intuition. However, as Machery et al have shown, the intuitions that western philosophers have about reference may not be shared by members of other cultures (specifically East Asian cultures1). Like I said, this is very interesting, though the implications are still up for debate, but it made me wonder about something that might be even more interesting (at least to me). What about the implicit intuitions that may drive certain philosophical theories?

If the last 30 years of research in cognitive science have taught me anything, it's that many of our basic cognitive intuitions, biases, tendencies, and processes, are unavailable for reflection. This is, in fact, why cognitive psychology is useful. If we could simply discover what our minds are doing through disciplined reflection, we'd have no need for third-person experimental techniques. Fortunately, there's enough about our cognition that is implicit, unconscious, or automatic to keep cognitive psychologists working for centuries to come. My question, then, is how do these implicit aspects of cognition affect philosophical theorizing? It would be beyond the scope of a blog post to look at a bunch of different implicit intuitions or biases, and wonder about their effects on philosophy, so I'll stick to one: psychological essentialism.

While "essentialism" as a metaphysical doctrine has been out of style at various times (and still is today, especially among post-Husserlian continental philosophers), it has been a dominant theme throughout the history of western metaphysics since at least Aristotle. Most recently, and inspired by the work of philosophers like Putnam and Kripke, realists of all sorts, from scientific realists to naturalists in legal philosophy have tended to adopt an essentialist metaphysics, at least about natural kinds. I don't want to address all of the arguments within analytic philosophy for and against essentialism (and to be honest, with the exception of some anti-realist analytic philosophies, I'm simply not qualified to do so), but I do want to wonder about the role of essentialist intuitions in the prominence of essentialism in western thought.

Psychological essentialism is a theory of concepts in cognitive psychology that involves the idea that people are basically essentialists in their reasoning. It doesn't entail metaphysical essentialism, but is instead an epistemological stance toward natural kind concepts, and perhaps other (e.g., functional kind) concepts as well. Psychological essentialism entails that people believe that things "have essences or underlying natures that make them the thing that they are."2. Furthermore, most people are unaware of what those essences are. As Gelman and Diesendruck3 put it:

Essentialism does not entail that people know (consciously or unconsciously) what the essence is. Medin and Ortony (1989)4 referred to this unknown-yet-believed-in entity as an “essence placeholder”. People may implicitly assume, for example, that there is some quality that bears share that confers category identity and causes identifiable surface features, and they may use this belief to guide inductive inferences and explanations without being able to identify any feature or trait as the bear essence. This belief can be considered an unarticulated heuristic rather than a detailed theory.

Under this view, when people encounter an instance of a kind, they use its perceptual features to categorize it, but the category itself is defined by its internal, unperceived essence. This is possible because people, as essentialists, believe that certain diagnostic perceptual properties (e.g., a giraffe's long neck) are causally related to certain underlying properties (genetics, transmission from parents, etc.).

There is a wide variety of evidence for essentialist intuitions, both in adults and in young children. For instance, people tend to classify things based on internal properties, rather than perceptual ones, even after they have undergone radical perceptual transformations (e.g., a skunk given the body of a squirrel)5. Also, at a young age, people tend to make inferences about the future states of natural kinds based on internal properties, rather than facts about the environment (for instance, children infer that apple seeds will become apple trees, regardless of the environmental conditions)6. Furthermore, when people believe that unseen essential properties determine category membership, they are more likely to defer to the opinion of experts7. While psychological essentialism theories of concepts do not capture all instance of categorization8, they do provide insight into many classification phenomena.

Psychological essentialism doesn't entail metaphysical essentialism, necessarily. Medin put it this way9:

If psychological essentialism is bad metaphysics, why should people act as if things had essences? The reason is that it may prove to be good epistemology. One could say that people adopt an essentialist heuristic, namely, the hypothesis that things that look alike tend to share deeper properties (similarities). Our perceptual and conceptual systems appear to have evolved such that the essentialist heuristic is very often correct ....

Still, in light of the recent discussions of intuitions among experimental philosophers, I can't help but wonder about the role of psychological essentialism in the formulation of essentialist metaphysics. If people have implicit essentialist intuitions which mirror the types of essentialist theories proposed by philosophers (notice how the description of psychological essentialism above resembles Kripke's essentialism and causal theories of reference), might the essentialist theories be driven by those intuitions? What would the implications of this be, if true? Might it mean that philosophers, or at least western philosophers, are biased toward essentialist metaphysical theories? Would these biases then need careful scrutiny? Or has the history of to-and-fro debate between essentialists and non-essentialists amounted to a scrutiny of these intuitions, even if they didn't address the intuitions themselves? I'm inclined to think that if the reliance on explicit intuitions calls into question the theories of analytic philosophy, then so too might the unconscious reliance on implicit intuitions, such as psychological essentialism. At least, I think it's an interesting issue to think about.

1 The work of Machery et al was inspired, in part, by the research presented in this book, which is very interesting, but still needs a strong experimental basis for most researchers to begin to take it seriously. It's interesting that some of that basis is coming from philosophers!
2From Medin D. L. (1989) Concepts and conceptual structure. American Psychologist 44: 1469-1481.
3 From Diesendruck G. & Gelman S. A.(1999). Domain differences in absolute judgments of category membership: Evidence for an essentialist account of categorization. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6(2), 338-346.
4 From Medin, D. L. & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning. New York: Cambridge University Press.
5 See e.g., Conceptual Change in Childhood by Susan Carey; Keil, F. (1986). Conceptual development and category structure. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and Conceptual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development by Frank Keil; and Rips, L. J. (1989). Similarity, typicality, and categorization. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning. New York: Cambridge University Press.
6 Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (1991). Insides and essences: Early understandings of the nonobvious. Cognition, 38, 213-244.
7 Deference in Categorisation: Evidence for Essentialism? by Nick Braisby.
8 See Barbara Malt (1994) Water is not H2O. Cognitive Psychology, 27, 41-70, as well as the Braisby paper, for some interesting examples.
9 From Medin D. L. (1989).


19 comments:

Clark Goble said...

Chris, you say that essentialism is out of fashion among Continental philosophers. In what sense do you mean that? After all it seems that Heidegger is very much an essentialist. Indeed up until his latter period he spends considerable time discussing the essence of this or that.

It is true that Heidegger (and latter figures) deny a pre-given complete essence that determines us. However I'm not sure that should be taken to imply that we have no essence nor that we avoid realism. I tend to take, for instance, Derrida, as rather close to the old medieval realists myself.

I'm sure that's not what you meant by essentialism, of course. However I wonder if we ought to see in Putnam a traditional essentialism either. Perhaps I'm merely misreading him. Is he a realist or an anti-realist? I tend to buy him as a realist, although I recognize I'm probably in the minority in that regard. Must be my Peircean bias.

Chris said...

Clark, I'm going to go sort of in reverse. First off, I think Putnam is widely recognized as a realist. In his latest work (The Threefold Cord), he describes his position as natural realism, and compares it to James, Dewey, and Wittgenstein. I'm not going to get into what natural realism is here (maybe in another post), but you're right, it's different from classical realism. Putnam's essentialism, though, comes from an earlier stage when his realism was a bit more like classical realism, and in the form of scientific realism, looks a lot like classical realism, though the essences themselves (scientifically discoverable causal properties) are different.

I also think that you're right about Heidegger. I know Dreyfus presents him as a realist, and Heidegger himself seems to want an almost common-sense metaphysics (though "metaphysics" is a bad word for it), at least in the earlier works. This is also true of my personal favorites, Bergson (not really post-Husserl, but close enough) and Merleau-Ponty. Still, even the early Heidegger, and especially the later Heidegger, strike me as directly opposed to classical essentialism, in which there is a language of reality, which may not be directly perceivable (essences are hidden), but which is somehow discoverable (discursively, dialectically, or however), and which determines the nature of things once and for all. An apple is an apple because it has apple essence (or in the scientific realism, because it has a certain casual relationship to its parent plant, a certain molecular structure, or whatever). I may be wrong about Heidegger's earlier works, because I haven't read Being in Time or the lectures from the 30s in a few years, but I don't remember anything that would imply he held a view that's similar to the essentialism that people seem to have as their basic default cognitive standpoint about natural kinds.

That's also how I see Derrida. I don't know enough about the midieval realists to really compare him to them, but I think I understand your point. Still, Derrida's entire project, as I interpret it, is to do away with the baggage that comes with reifying words like "essence," because they fails to highlight the constructed aspects of concepts, and experience. That's why he's so careful not to make his own concepts, like "differance," into methodological or theoretical constructs that carry such baggage. He may very well be a realist (probably more like James or the Putnam of The Threefold Cord than Kripke or Aristotelian essentialists), but I think he's an anti-essentialist in the sense that I think of "essentialism."

By the way, as a Piercian, do you think you could recommend a good secondary source on Pierce's logic?

Clark Goble said...

I didn't realize most took Putnam at his word as a realist. I guess I just have been talking to the wrong people. And here I thought I was in the minority...

I like the way you put it in terms of reification though. I think that what Continental thought does is try to avoid the reification of such matters. (Although I know Rorty oddly argues that the latter Heidegger starts to reify language ala the early Wittgenstein. But I tend to have lost most respect for Rorty's readings, to be honest.)

Clark Goble said...

Oh, regarding Peirce, if there is one must have book on Peirce it is Kelly Parker's The Continuity of Peirce's Thought. He ties together not only the logic but also the important place continuity has in his philosophy. Something all too often overlooked, but important - especially with regards to medieval realism and neoPlatonism parallels. The second great book doesn't really address Peirce's logic, but is a fantastic book. It is Reading Peirce Reading. Beyond that he is such a clear writer than the Essential Peirce probably is as good a text as any.

Chris said...

Clark, I have refused to read anything Rorty wrote after The Consequences of Pragmatism, other than his philosophy of mind, which I find downright peculiar.

Thank you very much for the Pierce suggestions. I read Essentials and another collection (Pierce on Signs, I think it's called) this summer, and want to delve deper into Pierce.

Chris said...

Oh, and I may be unusual when it comes to viewing Putnam as a realist, too, but given the influence of his "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" paper, and similar works, on realists, I've just assumed that people saw at least that period of his work as being genuinely realist. I could be wrong, though.

I actually like his new realism, though. It's much more compatible with my ecological realism (ala Gibson or Merleau-Ponty).

Clark Goble said...

I have to confess the embarrassing secret that I really liked Rorty initially in college. I found that Philosophy and Mirror of Nature was very impressive to me as a sophomore. Of course I was a sophomore, so it didn't mean much. I also have to confess that it was largely a few professors who found me reading it in the library for a paper who led me down that path. They did it mainly to irritate my professor who apparently didn't like Rorty much.

I still kind of like the skepticism Rorty brings forth. My understanding is that he basically inverts the criticisms of folk meanings and folk traditions by philosophers. In a sense this is in keeping with the pragmatic tradition which sees all knowledge more or less grounded upon common sense. Where he goes wrong, is in missing the vagueness inherent in common sense as well as the limits of common sense in terms of experience. In effect he just becomes a more sophisticated version of how a non-philosopher sees philosophical writing.

Chris said...

I'm a closet semi-fan of Rorty's earlier works as well. Even though his descriptions of the ideas of Derrida and other continental thinkers are a bit... off, I still like that he's able to express similar ideas in such straightforward language. I also like the basics of his pragmatism.

My impression is that the main reason analytic philosophers don't like him is that he doesn't play well with others. Apparently he has trouble responding to challenges to his ideas.

Clark Goble said...

Just rereading your post again. I wonder if the difference between psychological essentialism and metaphysical essentialism can be found in Heidegger in a way. Or rather that psychological essentialism is an emergent example of a more primordial kind of essentialism that Heidegger called for-the-sake-of. Metaphysical essentialism (metaphysics in the Heidegger sense) is the thinking that we can and do have definite descriptions of these psychological essenses.

The example that Dreyfus likes to use is for-the-sake-of being a teacher. There is no way to definitely describe what a teacher is. No criteria will ever make you a teacher. Rather it is an essence always "beyond" in a way. This then ends up being more or less the same idea as Derrida's discussion of a certain apocalypse endlessly deferred.

In a way all these essences are simply universals, after the all scholastic realist mold, albeit extricated from a metaphysical foundation. This then gets us to the kind of common-sense-realism of say Putnam, in that the real entities never are "present." (At best they are, to use the Peircean scheme, an endlessly deferred "in-the-long-run" arrangement.)

Chris said...

I hadn't thought of it that way, but I like the direction it takes the idea of intuitive essentialism. One of the interesting thing about the folk belief in essences is that, while most people will tell you that a kind has an essence, if asked, they will be unable to tell you what that essence is. I like to think of this phenomenon, and psychological essentialism in general, as a byproduct of language, which I think fits nicely with Heidegger and Derrida, though I'm not sure about Pierce. I think that the labels for things imply an essence, but the ever-changing context (Heidegger would probably call it becoming) makes it impossible to articulate that essence at any given moment. The essence is moving away from us anytime we utter the label for a thing. In that sense, it is endlessly deferred, but our uttering of the label, and our attitude toward the object, is always directed. It's this directionality, or investment in the object, and in the label (sort of like Quine's ontological commitment), that implies an essence.

I like interpreting this form the perspective of the realism of Putnam or the later Wittgenstein (especially his writings on mathematics). It implies that there may be a way that the world is, but that there is an endless number of ways in which we can approach the world, or be invested in it, and thus the way that the world is constantly moving away from us. I've always interpreted Pierce as believing that logically arrived-at conclusions will continually converge until they get to the point (off in infinity) at which they are final. I may be wrong to read him that way, but if not, that also fits nicely with the way I think this sort of realism works.

Chris said...

I just stumbled across this little quote, which seems appropriate, from the anti-James, FH Bradley (whom James saw as the anti-Bergson):

"Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct."

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