Karol Janicki, Against essentialism: Toward language awareness. Lincom Studies in Pragmatics 07. Munich: Lincom Europa. 1999. Pp. vi + 253. Pb $55.

Abstract

The book under review is a special one in regard to both content and form. The rich content of Against essentialism (AE) includes philosophical, linguistic, and social claims as well as the interrelationships between them. The form of AE is a continuation of a respectable tradition of dialogical and argumentative writing from Plato to Feyerabend. However, the focus of Janicki's investigations is not Feyerabend and his iconoclastic principles – for example, “Anything goes,” or the critique of the scientific method that is, Feyerabend's contribution to postmodern thought – but rather Popper's (1945) rejection of Aristotelian essentialism (cf. Janicki 1990). The main goals of AE are clear: first, to show the errors and harmfulness of essentialist thinking, the unjustified belief in the importance and power of definitions (or defining concepts and terms in sciences), and the claim that words and their definitions adequately reflect physical, mental or social reality; and second, to propose language awareness as a remedy that can alleviate the problems produced by the uncritical acceptance of essentialist ideology and philosophy. The main object of Janicki's critique is the social-scientific insistence on providing definitions of all concepts, including those that in reality cannot be defined. The eight dialogues in AE deal with crucial aspects of language use and its consequences for human (mis)communication, interpersonal relations, and various other social phenomena.