The Essential Child
Subtitle: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (Oxford Cognitive Development Series)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: March 20, 2003
Language: eng
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780195154061
First sentence: I begin this book with a confession: I was a child essentialist.
Description: "Essentialist accounts have been offered, in one form or another, for thousands of years, extending back at least to Aristotle and Plato. Yet this book is the first to address the issues surrounding essentialism from a psychological perspective. Gelman synthesizes more than fifteen years of empirical research on essentialism into a unified framework and explores the broader lessons that the research imparts concerning, among other things, human concepts, children's thinking, and the ways in which language influences thought. This volume will appeal to developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists, as well as to scholars in cognitive science and philosophy."--BOOK JACKET.