Kindhood and Essentialism: Evidence from Language

Abstract

A large body of existing research suggests that people think very differently about categories that are seen as kinds (e.g., women) and categories that are not seen as kinds (e.g., people hanging out in the park right now). Drawing on work in linguistics, we suggest that people represent these two sorts of categories using fundamentally different representational formats. Categories that are not seen as kinds are simply represented as collections of individuals. By contrast, when it comes to kinds, people have two distinct representations: a representation of a collection of individual people and a representation of the kind itself. The distinction between these two representational formats helps to shed light on otherwise puzzling findings about stereotyping and essentialism. Stereotyping appears to involve a representation of a collection of people, while essentialism involves a representation of a kind itself.

Essentializing inferences

“…I take it that even in predicate position, predicate nominals do not always have kind interpretations. For instance, when a predicate nominal includes several modifiers as in "Vivian is a tall funny mathematician" it is likely that there is no kind to which a tall funny mathematician can refer (see Chierchia, 1998;Markman, 1989;Prasada, Hennefield & Otap, 2012;Ritchie & Knobe, 2020). Therefore, a kind interpretation like that given for 1b is unavailable and an alternative interpretation is needed.…”