How essentialism shapes our thinking.
I think this idea, that people are natural “essentialists”—has important implications for both statistics and political science. In politics, there are these ideas that people have about Democrats, or Republicans, or Muslims, or various other groups. In statistics, as regular readers know, I continue to fight against discrete thinking, the division of research claims into “false positives,” “false negatives,” and so forth.
Anyway, listen to the whole thing, as the saying goes.
I don’t understand Susan’s main point on essentialism. What is the difference between “Dogs have four legs” and “All dogs have four legs”?
My main point is that people treat a wide range of categories (tigers, women, gold) as having an underlying, nonobvious reality. So, for an essentialist, there’s some hidden “essence” that all members of a category are thought to share (for ex., all tigers have the same essence), and this quality is thought to be inborn and immutable. Most of the time this intuitive belief about categories serves us well in making predictions about the world, but it also results in some erroneous beliefs and distortions (often when we’re thinking about categories of people). Young children are especially prone to essentialist reasoning errors.
“Dogs have four legs” is not itself an essentialist statement, but there is evidence that this way of talking about categories does encourage essentialist reasoning. An interesting point about “Dogs have four legs” (a generic statement) vs. “All dogs have four legs”, is that the generic enables statements that resist counter-evidence. If I tell you “All boys play with trucks”, even a single counter-evidence will disconfirm that generalization. But if I tell you “Boys play with trucks”, you can hold onto that generalization even if you see many counter-examples. In this sense, generics are especially powerful for expressing stereotypes.
Thanks for your interest, and I hope this helps explain some of my thinking on these issues!
Susan:
Ahh, interesting: I see a connection to the “no true Scotsman” thing that people are always talking about on the internet.
It’s an interesting idea that “All boys play with trucks” is a logical statement and thus open to refutation, while “Boys play with trucks” is somehow irrefutable. This reminds me of some of the so-called Psychological-Science-style research which aims to prove irrefutable statements regarding gender essentialism.
“Young children” -> “People” :)
Susan:
I find your research stream to be extremely interesting as the implications are wide ranging. As Andrew points out, there appears to be a connection to the rhetorical tactic of attempting to paint someone into a corner with a “no true Scotsman” assertion and on the other side of the coin the way in which a generic statement may provide a path to reconciliation in a disagreement where an essentialist statement may not.
There also appears to be a connection to labelling and stigma related to mental health issues the military finds very difficult to overcome. On a different but related issue, there appears to be a possible connection to what I have always thought was an individual difference in thinking. Many self-report psychological assessments include “lie scales” or items that are coded as indicative of deception, whereas I have suspected that the absolutist thinking represented by the “all dogs have four legs” may be a tendency that is not necessarily indicative of deception, but rather a syntactic tendency. While there may be psychological implications to this absolutism, the strong inference of deception seems to be an essentialist framing of the response.
Generics like “Dogs have four legs” have several other interesting properties that explicitly quantified statements do not have. For example, “Mosquitoes carry the west nile virus” seems true. This is puzzling because the statement is by and large inaccurate — the vast majority of mosquitoes do not carry the west nile virus. There is a lot of interesting linguistic and psychological research on this topic (See https://www.princeton.edu/~sjleslie/GenericsCognitionAcquisitionUncorrectedProofs.pdf)
Thanks for the link to Sarah-Jane Leslie’s work. I’m a huge fan, and am fortunate to have collaborated with her on a few projects!
Doesn’t (good) English already have the right constructs to distinguish these finer meanings?
Some Mosquitoes carry the WNV / Mosquitoes can carry the WNV. All Mosquitoes are insects.
Females mosquitoes are ectoparasites. (Most but not all implied)
Dogs have four legs. Doesn’t exclude a crippled dog with only three legs from dog-ness. The leading “Most” seems implied unless you explicit qualify with “All”. e.g. All Dogs are mammals.
There are two types of people in the world: those that divided people into two types, and those who don’t.
I prefer the phrasing, “There are 10 types of people in the world …” ;~)
…., those that understand binary numbers, and those that don’t”.
@Susan: I had a Ph.D. student, Arik Cohen, who wrote a very nice thesis on the semantics and pragmatic of generics; see all the great subsequent papers in Arik Cohen’s publications.
The above-linked paper cites Arik’s thesis, but he’s done lots of work since then.
I think it’s a shame that so much of linguistics, philosophy and psychology is still done in a logical positivist tradition, including all the work of Putnam et al. on “natural kinds”. I became much more of a pragmatist in the Wittgenstein or Rorty (or later Quine).
Despite the fact that I really don’t like most of Searle’s writing from the 1980s on, his essay on metaphor and analogy is important and I used to teach it in my philosophy of language course. He makes the point that our analogy “Sam’s a tiger” is going to work for communication even if the analogy is false — what’s important is the shared understanding of what “tiger-like properties” are, not their “essence”; so even if they are sleepy rather than fierce, the analogy works for pragmatic reasons. It’s in Martinich’s Philosophy of Language collection (which is well worth reading); see Searle, John R., 1979a, “Metaphor,” in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 76–116.
@Andrew: Nice pun.
Bob, thanks for the cites! I’ve followed Cohen’s work, and look forward to reading the Searle piece.
Bob:
Thanks for posting Arik Cohen’s papers. They look quite interesting. I find your pragmatic perspective appealing and once wrote a short paper for a seminar making a similar argument. Where I find shared meaning to be especially important for psychological assessment via verbal items is where there are different groups with different shared meaning for the same phrases. Generational effects are a good example of this where idioms are used in assessment items that no longer mean the same thing 10 or 20 years after, not to mention the literature on cultural differences. A good recent example of this literature is the paper by Diener, Inglehart, & Tay (2013) (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-012-0076-y).
Also, thanks again for generously sharing your time and expertise at the Stan Meetup.