Originally a comment by Eric MacDonald on The war against infidels.
Essentialism is a fairly universal tendency of seeing things as have defining qualities. Without some kind of essentialism it would be hard to distinguish one sort of thing from another. Science, for example, has its essentialists (indeed, the periodic table is based on essences), and no doubt the fans of football, cricket and hockey, chess, monopoly, and other games, have what they consider to be essential properties of their favourite games. Your claim, therefore, that “essentialism is one of the cognitive biases that both underlies and is encouraged by religious thinking” is really quite misleading. Wittgenstein, as you are no doubt aware, was opposed to this sort of … Read the rest
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