Children are innate essentialists??

In the class, I wondered how we know that a whale actually is not fish. I also wondered when we start understanding that plants also have lives like we do. It seems that we just know everything about this world naturally after we grew up. Recent studies have suggested that we learn to categorize by judging essential requirements for each categories. In addition, the study by Gelman and her colleagues (1994) suggested that children already have innate assumptions of the world. In other words, children already have ability to make judgments on essential conditions. In order to test their hypothesis, Gelman and her colleagues (1994) ruled out several explanations that children develop the knowledge of the world by reviewing other studies. Specifically, they ruled out the explanation such that children’s judgments do not rely on perceptual similarity, their past experiences and teaching from their parents. Nevertheless, children’s past experiences, their perceptual development and their parents help children to become essentialist.

First of all, it is impossible that children would do well on categorizing without their perceptual observation. For instance, to understand the concept of living and non-living, children need to observe the differences and the similarities between living objects and non-living objects. The more detailed they observe between living objects and non-living objects, the more concrete concepts of living and non-living they have developed. Specifically, they might notice all living subject would move, and then they observed that all living objects would grow and die. Thus, it is possible that children construct the essential conditions for each categories based on their perceptual development.

Second, the past experience plays an important role on helping children to revise their existed categories. Take the study of gender-role properties as an example. Children in young age were confused of the gender of a male Barbie if it were dressed in a skirt. However, children in older age, they knew what is essential to determine genders and were not confused the gender role by outside appearance . Related to children’s perceptual development, children in young age only noticed the outside appearance. But, how do children start to notice what is essential to observe? Apparently, children might know the essential differences between genders through their past experiences. For example, they might notice the difference between body structures of genders when they take bath with their siblings or their parents. So, their past experience might give them chance to observe the salient difference among categories.

Third, although parents do not explicitly teach their children an essentialist philosophy, parents might influence children’s reasoning. Children might have more past experiences than others if their parents encourage them to discover this world. For example, preschool children with helicopter parents might be prevented from observing animals, insects or plants closely because their parents are overprotecting. They worry that their children might get germs or get hurt from playing with animals, insects or plants. Thus, preschool children with helicopter parents might not have enough experiences and observations to construct their theory of the world than other preschool children with normal parents. In addition, the children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of world and human than children with non-responsive parents. For instance, responsive parents give corrective information to their children repeatedly and rapidly when their children think that a caterpillar is a still caterpillar after it grows up. On the other hand, non-responsive parents might ignore the errors that children made and the questions that children asked. Presumably, children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of the world and human because responsive parents encourage them to seek new knowledge and revise the incorrect concepts of the world and human that children made.

In conclusion, although the study by Gelman (1994) provided the evidence that preschool children are innate essentialists, children still need their past experience, their perception and the knowledge from their parents to build up the assumptions of the world. For example, it is doubtful that a child would know that there is blood inside of his or her body if he or she never experiences bleeding or sees others bleed. Therefore, it is possible that children’s innate knowledge of the world is not innate. Instead, children’s theory of the world and human is based on he combination of their perceptual observation, accumulation of past experiences and the knowledge from their parents.