Exam 4: Essentialism and Reductionism: Enemies or Friends?

What could be an example of an essential property of a human female?

Essentialism does not claim that all members of a class of people are identical, only that they share the same essential properties that mark them as one thing rather than another.

According to Peterson (1997), most contemporary ______________ prefer to regard people as biopsychosocial beings, believing that people and their behavior are best explained in terms of relevant biological mechanisms, psychological processes, and social influences.

Classical essentialism is best exemplified by ___________ notion that things have attributes that are necessary, unalterable, and indispensible.

All criminological theories that have evolved under sociology's wing are reductionist from a sociological point of view because they appeal to individuals, their natures, and their motivations.

The reductionist goal of _______________ is intimately tied to the determinist goal of __________.

A non-essential property that a subject may not have or lose without changing its nature is a __________ property.

_______________ means that higher-level phenomena can be fully explained by lower-level properties, and that the higher-level properties have no causal impact independent of their parts.

According to the text, neo-essentialism is not the straightjacket of Plato's _______________ essentialism, or even Aristotle's ____________ essentialism.

The philosophical concepts most often used pejoratively by social scientists are most probably social constructionism and reductionism.

___________ describes the relationship between a young and insecure science and its adjacent older science.

Categorization is the search for common properties, which __________ diversity.

__________ is a series of self-organizing processes that produce qualitative "novelties" that cannot be fully expressed as the sums of the quantitative propertied of the constituent parts.

____________ is the process of taking causal explanations from higher, fuzzier levels, to deeper, more precise levels.

According to the text, ___________ has made its greatest strides when it has picked apart wholes to examine the parts, and in doing so has gained a better understanding of the wholes they constitute.