Essentialism
[6] Beliefs which posit that social identities such as race, ethnicity, nationality, or gender are essential characteristics have been central to many discriminatory or extremist ideologies.
Empirical knowledge is developed from experience of a relational universe whose components and attributes are defined and measured in terms of intellectually constructed laws.
[citation needed] In Plato's philosophy, in particular the Timaeus and the Philebus, things were said to come into being by the action of a demiurge who works to form chaos into ordered entities.
[15] In the case of Homo sapiens, the divergent conceptions of human nature may be partitioned into essentialist versus non-essentialist (or even anti-essentialist) positions.
Hedonistic utilitarianism is a less objectionable version of monism, according to which the best human life is one that contains as much pleasure and as little suffering as possible – but like Nazism, it leaves no room for meaningful choice about enhancement.Before evolution was developed as a scientific theory, the essentialist view of biology posited that all species are unchanging throughout time.
The historian Mary P. Winsor has argued that biologists such as Louis Agassiz in the 19th century believed that taxa such as species and genus were fixed, reflecting the mind of the creator.
Winsor, Ron Amundson and Staffan Müller-Wille have each argued that in fact the usual suspects (such as Linnaeus and the Ideal Morphologists) were very far from being essentialists, and that the so-called "essentialism story" (or "myth") in biology is a result of conflating the views expressed and biological examples used by philosophers going back to Aristotle and continuing through to John Stuart Mill and William Whewell in the immediately pre-Darwinian period, with the way that biologists used such terms as species.
[24][25] First, they argue that biological species are dynamic entities, emerging and disappearing as distinct populations are molded by natural selection.
Lastly, non-essentialists assert that every organism has a mutational load, and the variability and diversity within species contradict the notion of fixed biological natures.
[26][27] Gay/lesbian rights advocate Diana Fuss wrote: "Essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the 'whatness' of a given entity.
Essentialism thus refers to the existence of fixed characteristic, given attributes, and ahistorical functions that limit the possibilities of change and thus of social reorganization.
Evelyn Fox Keller,[31] Sandra Harding, [32] and Nancy Tuana [33] argued that the modern scientific enterprise is inherently patriarchal and incompatible with women's nature.
Other feminist scholars, such as Ann Hibner Koblitz,[34] Lenore Blum,[35] Mary Gray,[36] Mary Beth Ruskai,[37] and Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram[38] have criticized those theories for ignoring the diverse nature of scientific research and the tremendous variation in women's experiences in different cultures and historical periods.
[39][40] In the early 20th century, many anthropologists taught this theory – that race was an entirely biological phenomenon and that this was core to a person's behavior and identity.
[41] This, coupled with a belief that linguistic, cultural, and social groups fundamentally existed along racial lines, formed the basis of what is now called scientific racism.
[43] New studies of culture and the fledgling field of population genetics undermined the scientific standing of racial essentialism, leading race anthropologists to revise their conclusions about the sources of phenotypic variation.
[44] Historically, beliefs which posit that social identities such as ethnicity, nationality or gender determine a person's essential characteristics have in many cases been shown to have destructive or harmful results.
[49] Strategic essentialism, a major concept in postcolonial theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
[52] Pelillo argues that traditional machine learning techniques often align with an essentialist paradigm by relying on features - properties assumed to be essential for classification tasks.
For instance, pattern recognition, which attempts to extract essential attributes from data, is described as inherently essentialist since it presupposes that objects have stable, identifiable essences that define their categories.
[53] Expanding on this, Pelillo and Scantamburlo highlight that certain machine-learning scenarios, such as when data is highly dimensional or features are poorly defined, challenge the essentialist framework.
[54] Šekrst and Skansi build on these ideas, noting that supervised learning, by utilizing labeled datasets, reflects essentialist tendencies since it relies on predefined human-defined categories.
Instead, they propose that the categories used in supervised learning are human-constructed in feature selection processes and reflect epistemological practices rather than metaphysical truths.
Similarly, unsupervised learning's clustering and similarity-based approaches often resemble prototypical reasoning but do not inherently affirm or deny essentialism, focusing instead on pragmatic task performance.
Herodotus, for example, claims that Egyptian culture is essentially feminized and possesses a "softness" which has made Egypt easy to conquer.
[56] To what extent Herodotus was an essentialist is a matter of debate; he is also credited with not essentializing the concept of the Athenian identity,[57] or differences between the Greeks and the Persians that are the subject of his Histories.
