Concept of Essentialism - Essay Example

For those who tried to explicate essentialism to understand the complex subject of sexuality, essentialist argued that human beings have definite sexual orientation since birth—male or female. Factors driven from society are considered insignificant in the determination of person's sexual orientations, including in their understanding of this concept. Such fixed sexual orientation for all human beings is distributed in a continuum from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. This however vary in other nations which considered homosexuality as a natural phenomena and thus necessary at arriving the wholeness of their beings.

For instance, in an anthropological ideation, there is a significant number of Sambia people that have continued to have same-sex relations or excessive heterosexual relations albeit completion of their rites to adulthood. Essentialists who are engrossed in the study of biology, on the other hand, also posited that homosexuality is determined by biological and psychological factors. This contention asserted that the genetic make up of human beings will have scientific implication to personal characteristics and gender of a person, although this is further shaped by evolutionary forces (Houston, 2007).

Essentialism therefore regarded homosexuality as form of gender inversion determined by genes, hormones, and developmental psychodynamics (Houston, 2007). Hence, it is considered as an inner sense. Other theorists like Kripke (1972), Putnam (1975), Quine (1977) developed ideas using semantics structure which phenomenally improved the precepts of psychological essentialism. Essentialism, for them, is a way of positioning themselves and by treating persons and objects by their underlying natures and essences that made them as they are Often, this essence have properties which may have consequential results from these essences.

This is significant because it distinguishes essentialized representations from figurative correlation of features, such as, being an affiliate of a group of a kind construed as causally possessing certain features and not otherwise. Although there are varied lenses in which cognitive system can illustrate essentialist assumptions but its purposive to identify the fundamental requirements of essentialism, i.e., what is significant at the minimum to qualify an object or subject as meaningfully essentialist.

Medin and Ortony (1989) called this an “essence placeholder” where natural concepts on specific features of an object or a person are tied. Both Medin and Ortony argued that people may have not consciously integrated the explicit beliefs pertaining to essences but they actuate as if the properties of objects were the result of essences. For Gelman and Diesendruck (1999), people need not know consciously and unconsciously the essence but the “essence placeholder” confers category identity and thus, developed identifiable features, behavioral patterns, practices, and even language to guide inductive inferences and explanations to explicate the essences.

This can be an unexplicated heurism instead of a an illustrated theory. Gelman and Diesendruck (1999) explained that people do not show reliance on direct evidences about the “essence” itself. However, they may represent it to identify an entity as