Constructivist Set-Theoretic Analysis: An Alternative to Essentialist Social Science

Abstract

Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias through which human beings conceive the entities around them as having inner essences and basic natures. Social scientists routinely generate flawed inferences because their methods require the truth of psychological essentialism. This article develops set-theoretic analysis as a scientific-constructivist approach that overcomes the bias of psychological essentialism. With this approach, the “sets” of set-theoretic analysis are mental phenomena that establish boundaries and identify similarities and differences among entities whose natural kind composition is not known. The approach is illustrated through a consideration of research on intelligence, race, and poverty in the United States.

Sets, Net Effects, Causal Mechanisms, Subpopulations, and Understanding: A Comment on Mahoney

“…Stereotypes, as one kind of essentialist thinking, may lead us to misrepresent the kinds of relations we might discover by attending to the actual data, both by not corresponding to the data but by leading us away from better explanations. He wishes “to escape this insidious essentialism,” and to do this “we need an approach that allows us to analyze the social world as composed of something other than entities in possession of internally or externally-derived properties that do not depend ontologically on human minds” (Mahoney 2023, 339). As we will see later, his example of such an internally derived property is intelligence.…”

“…He assumes that we normally do experience entities in this insidious essentialist way. This is a complex and puzzling thought, but the punchline is this: “We need an approach that views human reality in a way that does not correspond to how we ordinarily experience it” (Mahoney 2023, 339).…”

“…If the new categories are themselves intelligible or intelligibility producing, we have a potential improvement over our essentialist ones. He is not promoting mindless big data, but something else: new approaches that do “depend ontologically on human minds” (Mahoney 2023, 339). There is another bit of Kant that applies here.…”

“…2 The idea is that this concept will help us with non-natural, social kinds, which allow us to think about mind-dependent social entities, of the kind we are familiar with. Conceptual spaces are, for him real parts of the cognitive machinery that perform a certain task: “Through conceptual spaces, human minds transform mostly incomprehensible natural substances and properties into the coherent social entities of human reality” (Mahoney 2023, 331). In short, cognitive spaces create what we experience as entities.…”

“…Mahoney moves them to the psychological or cognitive side. Thus, instead of, for example, using Weber’s term, “ideal-types,” which applied to constructions that were meant to replace “essentialist” terms with meaningful but less ideologically loaded terms, Mahoney uses the term used in cognitive space theory, prototypes, for an analogous purpose, of escaping from faulty stereotypes, or essentialisms (Mahoney 2023, 341).…”