Teleological Essentialism

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. In our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated by Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kind of experiments used by traditional essentialists-involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), acquired traits (study 3), and inferences about offspring (study 4)-we find support for the view that essences are elaborated by a telos. And we find evidence (study 5) that teleological essences may generate category judgments.

[1]  Paul Bloom,et al.  Religion is natural. , 2007, Developmental science.

[2]  Zachary Estes,et al.  Metamorphosis : Essence , appearance , and behavior in the categorization of natural kinds , 2010 .

[3]  Edouard Machery,et al.  Deep trouble for the deep self , 2012 .

[4]  George E. Newman,et al.  Water Is and Is Not H2O , 2017 .

[5]  Nina Strohminger,et al.  The essential moral self , 2014, Cognition.

[6]  C. Meek,et al.  Graphical models: selecting causal and statistical models , 1997 .

[7]  David Rose,et al.  Folk intuitions of actual causation: a two-pronged debunking explanation , 2017 .

[8]  D. Kelemen,et al.  The Human Function Compunction: Teleological explanation in adults , 2009, Cognition.

[9]  Joshua Knobe,et al.  Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment , 2015, Cogn. Sci..

[10]  J. Altham.  Naming and necessity. , 1981 .

[11]  Joshua Rottman,et al.  Journal of Experimental Psychology : General Professional Physical Scientists Display Tenacious Teleological Tendencies : Purpose-Based Reasoning as a Cognitive Default , 2012 .

[12]  Jordan B. Peterson.  The Meaning of Meaning , 2007 .

[13]  David Rose,et al.  Persistence through function preservation , 2014, Synthese.

[14]  J. Piaget.  The Child's Conception of Physical Causality , 1927 .

[15]  David Maxwell Chickering,et al.  Optimal Structure Identification With Greedy Search , 2002, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[16]  Joshua Knobe,et al.  Normative Judgments and Individual Essence. , 2017, Cognitive science.

[17]  D. Iacobucci,et al.  A Meditation on Mediation: Evidence that Structural Equations Models Perform Better than Regressions , 2007 .

[18]  B. Malt.  Water is Not H2O , 1994, Cognitive Psychology.

[19]  Shaun Nichols,et al.  The Lesson of Bypassing , 2013 .

[20]  Joshua Knobe,et al.  Value Judgments and the True Self , 2014, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[21]  S. Gelman.  Psychological essentialism in children , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[22]  Wesley Buckwalter,et al.  Actionability Judgments Cause Knowledge Judgments , 2016 .

[23]  N. Haslam.  The essence of essentialism? , 2014, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[24]  H. Wellman,et al.  Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious , 1991, Cognition.

[25]  D Kelemen,et al.  Why are rocks pointy? Children's preference for teleological explanations of the natural world. , 1999, Developmental psychology.

[26]  David Rose,et al.  Folk teleology drives persistence judgments , 2018, Synthese.

[27]  J. Locke.  An Essay concerning Human Understanding , 1924, Nature.

[28]  Shaun Nichols,et al.  From punishment to universalism , 2018, Mind & Language.

[29]  Jonathan Schaffer,et al.  Folk Mereology is Teleological , 2017 .