Essentialism and generic language

Essentialism is the idea that items in certain categories have an underlying reality that explains their manifest appearance and determines what has to hold for a given item to be one and the same over time.  I argue that essentialism is an early cognitive bias.  Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations.

Further, I propose that language conveys important essentialist implications. Although many have argued that language should have no substantive role in the formation or structure of concepts, I discuss two primary ways that language (implicitly) expresses essentialism. One is by conveying membership in a richly structured category (naming; e.g., “This is a dog”), the other is by conveying the scope of a proposition (generic noun phrases; e.g., “Dogs are 4-legged”). Generic nouns are of particular interest, as they pose a puzzling challenge for semantic theories more generally. I discuss the inductive puzzle that generics present to language learners, evidence regarding how children solve this puzzle, and preliminary findings suggesting that generics affect reasoning. These component pieces all suggest that generics are semantically important and early-acquired, and have the potential to influence children’s conceptual representations.