The Essential Child

Abstract Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as “dog,” “man,” or “intelligence,” have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. This book argues 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. This book argues against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious, instead claiming that children…