Gender Essentialism and Responses to Candidates’ Messages

People often form negative attitudes against those who deviate from gender norms. Within the political realm, this has the potential to translate into effects on perceptions of candidate likability and traits. Female candidates who tend to focus on issues stereotypically thought of as feminine are generally more positively evaluated than those who focus on stereotypically masculine domains. The current studies investigate whether these effects vary depending on the extent to which people endorse gender essentialism, which is the tendency to attribute gender differences to relatively more intrinsic, innate, and immutable factors versus believing that gender differences are largely due to cultural and learned factors. Current data with adults across two studies suggest a number of interesting findings: Evaluations of candidates depended on an interaction between respondents’ gender essentialism and whether or not the candidate’s message fit traditional stereotypes. In particular, high essentialist respondents felt significantly more negative toward male candidates with nonstereotypic messages.     

Introduction: Organ Transplantation—A Challenge for Global Ethics

A social scientific interpretation of the development of global ethics is offered. Both spontaneous and intended mechanisms of the construction of such an ethics within the broader processes of globalization are analyzed, and possible theoretical foundations are suggested. The scientific and technological achievements that gave rise to the medical procedure of organ transplantation generated new questions and challenges that theologians, scholars of religion, natural scientists, and social scientists are now trying to resolve.     

为普遍主义辩护——兼评中国文化特殊主义思潮

Universalism can be defined as the belief in the universal application of certain knowledge, world-views and value-views. Universalism has often been confused with Occident-centrism, due to the fact that the latter was used to justify the former, which confused the content of a thought with the social condition that gave rise to the thought. For many years, clarifications of this confusion have been made in sociology of knowledge, relativism and skepticism. Yet, the particularistic conclusion thus reached has led to more confusion, namely, that between the intrinsic criterion for truth and the practical application of thought. China, with its long tradition of Sino-centrism, has recently shown a movement towards particularism, characterized by a search for national and cultural superiority by “returning to the source”. In today’s academic circles, some particularist themes are taken for granted, and believed to be true, but cannot be proved with rational examination. The particularistic claims to the “self grounded”, “self-featured” and “self-located” tradition of Chinese culture jointed with the post-modernism, neo-leftist movement of anti-globalization in the West, are not only harmful in practice, but also impotent in theory. The propaganda against the hegemony of Western discourse should be analyzed with questioning which hegemony and whose discourse. Translated by Yang Xiaohua and Zhao Dunhua from Xueshu yuekan 学术月刊 (Academic Monthly), 2007, (5): 34–40, with some revisions     

Book Reviews

James Campbell, Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric     

The Woman in Black: Exposing Sexist Beliefs About Female Officials in Elite Men’s Football

In this paper, we argue that there are important differences between playing and non-playing roles in sport. The relevance of sex differences poses genuine philosophical and ethical difficulties for feminism in the context of playing sport. In the case of non-playing roles in general, and officiating in particular, we argue that reference to essential differences between men and women is irrelevant. Officiating elite men’s football is not a role for which ‘essential’ (psychological and biological) differences are causally implicated neither in competence nor excellence. Reference to such purported differences to justify the exclusion of women from roles such as officiating is unfounded and sexist.     

The Red and The Real

It is often claimed that principles of individuation imply essential properties of the things individuated. For example, sets are individuated by their members, hence sets have their members essentially. But how does this inference work? First I discuss the form of such inferences, and conclude that the essentialist inference is not a purely formal matter: although there is a form which all principles of individuation have in common, it is not true that any statement of that form is a principle of individuation, and hence there is no valid inference based purely on that form. However, I argue that there is a viable version of the essentialist inference nonetheless. The resources for a proper reconstruction of this type of inference can be gathered from reflections upon the role principles of individuation play in the project of the ontologist: such principles turn out to carry a modal weight similar to that of definitions or conceptual truths. It follows that, no matter how austere the ontology, some portion of essentialist modality is inevitable.     

Essence in abundance

Fine (1994 “Essence and Modality”, Philosophical Perspectives, 8: 1–16) is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis (1983. “New Work For a Theory of Universals”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61: 343–377; 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell) draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed by Fine, and fails to capture paradigmatic instances of essence involving abundant properties and relations.     

Teleological Essentialism

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. In our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated by Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kind of experiments used by traditional essentialists—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), acquired traits (study 3), and inferences about offspring (study 4)—we find support for the view that essences are elaborated by a telos. And we find evidence (study 5) that teleological essences may generate category judgments.