ABSTRACT
The term essentialism appears to have been coined by the philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s (see Popper, 1982), although the notion of “essence” has a history in philosophical discourse that stretches to Aristotle and beyond. For Popper, essentialism characterized any intellectual position that took concepts to have precise, ascertainable meanings, and the associated methodological stance that takes attempts to
explicate, fix, and sharpen word meanings to be important steps toward reliable knowledge. Popper vigorously opposed these positions, espousing an antiessentialism in which word meanings are considered fundamentally inexact and ambiguous, prone to change over time, and a function of the context in which the word is used. Consequently, in the quest for knowledge we should avoid quarreling about word meanings and focus instead on determining the truth of propositions and theories.
