Essentialism

In learning about children’s conceptual development, I have been very intrigued with the concept of naïve biology, essentialism in particular. Part of the reason that I find it so intriguing is that it has been hard to completely wrap my mind around. The reason for this, I believe, is that essentialism plays a subconscious role in the development of concepts and is, therefore, something that people take for granted. That is, children seem to innately possess ideas that “categories of things in the world have a true, underlying nature or essence that causes things to be in particular categories,” which is Susan Gelman’s definition of essentialism.
I also found the evidence of essentialism to be very interesting. This evidence shows that children are able to form and hold concepts about various things without having any prior knowledge about the particular concept. The first piece of evidence, inductive potential, the ability of young children (4 and 5 year olds) to group things into categories even though a member of a category may appear as if it belongs to as different category, supports the notion that very young children have an innate understanding that certain things belong to together in the same category because they share a certain essence.
Innate dispositions, a second piece of evidence of essentialism, involve the idea that nature is sometimes stronger than nurture. In other words, young children are able to recognize that you cannot change the disposition of something, such as an animal, by taking it out of its natural environment and rearing it somewhere else. Innate dispositions suggest that young children possess the ability to accurately predict the behavior of a particular organism based on an innate understanding of the nature of that organism.
The third piece of evidence that we discussed was maintenance of identity, which shows that children seem to understand for the most part that you cannot change the identity of an organism or an object by disguising it. However, younger children have some difficulty realizing that you cannot change the identity of an organism by operating on that object. The ability of children to recognize that you cannot change the identity of an object or organism by making superficial changes to it once again shows that children have an innate understanding that the identity of things do not change by altering them superficially.
Essentialism proves to be a useful because it allows people to hold an idea about a particular object or organism without knowing exactly why the object or organism is the way it is. However, essentialism can also produce and perpetuate false concepts. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that from a very young age children are able to understand their surrounding world based on their knowledge of the underlying essence of the objects and organisms around them.