The causes of characteristic properties: insides versus categories.
Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) propose that the inherence heuristic, a tendency to explain the behavior and other properties of things in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, precedes and explains "essentialist thinking" about natural kinds. This commentary reviews evidence that it is rather essentialism (or something like it) that precedes the assumption of inherence, and suggests that essentialism can do without the inherence heuristic altogether.
Department of Philosophy,New York University,New York,NY 10003.strevens@nyu.eduhttp://www.strevens.org.
Michael
M
Strevens
D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008128:Logic