Essentialism

Twentieth-century philosophers have supplemented such criticism by critiquing essentialist philosophies of language. For example, Richard Rorty advocates permanently abandoning essence. Essentialism necessarily requires a value-free vocabulary that can report facts and render sets of factual statements commensurable. However, language is not a neutral medium through which truth or fact is reported; it is also neither an arbitrary nor a necessary system of signs connecting words and things. Language cannot be understood as composed of words or sentences in any nominalist way. Words are saturated with social meanings. They incorporate accounts of experience and ways of recognizing it as a case of x as opposed to y. Even what feels like empirical experience is already linguistically organized. Language is best apprehended in terms of language games, complex sets of practices that constitute ways of life. Furthermore, these games are not grounded in anything outside or beyond themselves. Relationships of reference, for example, are not objectively necessary but simply further parts of the world of the present day.

Social constructionists typically emphasize the constituting effect of human practices. However, some, for example Michel Foucault (1926–1984), extend the domain of relevant practices and propose novel approaches to questions of meaning and truth. Unlike many pragmatists and constructionists, Foucault pays close attention to relations of power and how these both enable and constrain modes of subjectivity, meaning, knowledge and truth. Foucault relocates problems of identity, truth, knowledge, reality, and meaning outside their traditional domains of ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics into discourse analysis. Discourses are complex, dynamic systems of practices, knowledge, and multiple kinds of power. Such discourses generate disciplinary norms that simultaneously produce and constrain subjects and question formation; they enable participants to recognize and evaluate truth claims. Foucault suggests displacing "what/who is it?" as central questions about any of these topics with a different one—"how is it?" How is it requires a genealogy that unpacks multiple kinds of practices. Among the practices some subjects are expected to enact are the discovery or enunciation of the essences of things, including themselves. Genealogies of historically specific discourses indicate that questions about essences could arise and remain salient or even intelligible only within certain ways of life.