Quotes About Essentialist

In recent years, historians have broken with the essentialist notion of Indians as noble primitives capable of change only as a form of decay. Rejecting that ahistorical fantasy, historians now define Indianness as an adaptability that interweaves tradition with innovation in a struggle for cultural survival in a transformed land.

As indicated by our example, methodological nominalism is nowadays fairly generally accepted in the natural sciences. The problems of the social sciences, on the other hand, are still for the most part treated by essentialist methods. This is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons for their backwardness.

For Aristotle's essentialist definitions are the principles from which all our knowledge is derived; they thus contain all our knowledge; and they serve to substitute a long formula for a short one. As opposed to this, the scientific or nominalist definitions do not contain any knowledge whatever, not even any 'opinion'; they do nothing but introduce new arbitrary shorthand labels; they cut a long story short.