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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on If reductionism is the hammer, what nails are out there? - Less Wrong
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Essentialism seems to me to be more general than anti-reductionism. One can be a reductionist essentialist.
I take essentialism to be the view that there is a privileged classification scheme that applies to all things in the world, and that the position that a thing T occupies in this scheme is entirely determined by whether T possesses a certain package of essential qualities. All other qualities of T are accidental.
Thus, to determine whether T is an X, you just need to run down a checklist of qualities x_1, . . ., x_n and see whether T has all of them. The classification scheme is unambiguous; if T doesn't have one of the x_i's, then T is an altogether different kind of thing.
Furthermore, these essential qualities aren't exceedingly exotic. Having every arrangement of atoms be a different essential quality wouldn't count. The classification scheme that the essential qualities induce is well-approximated by the classification scheme that we use in everyday life. For example, the true classification scheme should include categories that closely align with our concepts of living vs. nonliving and male vs. female.
In practice, this means that things are best thought of as a bundle of essential qualities, plus a diff of accidental qualities. Good practical and ethical reasoning focuses far more on the essential qualities than on the accidental ones.
But taking this view doesn't rule out being a reductionist. You could be an essentialist while still believing that to have essential qualities x_1, . . ., x_n means to have the arrangement of your atoms be in a certain set of possible arrangements. You would just hold that, for whatever reason, the possible arrangements of atoms can be classified with a scheme of the above sort.
Eliezer's sequence on words is a good antidote to this kind of thinking.
Two different schools of "outsider science" leap to mind.
The first is Ayn Rand's theory of concepts from her attempt to construct an epistemology to theoretical ground Objectivist arguments as being "about physical reality". I've never actually read her work here, but Adam Reed has a summary of Rand's theory of concepts which sounds very much like your proposed "reductionist essentialism".
The second is something I discovered a few days ago via LW, which is the "Baraminology Study Group" which appears to be an attempt to figure out a classification scheme for animals that is both (1) physically grounded and (2) consistent with the young earth creationist assertion that breeding pairs of each "kind" (or "baramin" in their jargon) could all have fit on Noah's Arc and subsequently diverged via "microevolution" into the animals we see today.
This almost makes me wonder if there might be as-yet-undetected human variation on this dimension the way people's visualization abilities have substantial variation?
Perhaps hardcore realists lack any cognitive machinery for managing concepts other than cognitive essentialist machinery, or their essentialist module is turned up to 11? Or perhaps nominalists have somewhat broken cognitive essentialist machinery and have to fall back on more flexible but more expensive "general reasoning" faculties?
And now that I spell this out, I think it may offer an actually testable mechanistic hypothesis that could be used as the basis of a coherent experiment in psychoceramics! :-D
If I try to construct a "sociologically nonjudgmental" theory I think it would go something like this: "There is variation in human essentialist reasoning tendencies [from some source] though different study communities tend to be relatively homogeneous in this respect. When one or more people attempt to study a domain bringing radically different essentialist reasoning tendencies to bear on the subject their theories are almost necessarily incommensurable and communicative isolation is the result. Any sufficiently-low-status 'communicatively isolated' theoretical community is liable to be labeled 'crackpot', will be out-competed for grants and tenure, and tend to lack the time and money to socially enforce epistemic rigor."
The theory's testable hypothesis is that a psychological instrument to assess a person's use and orientation towards cognitive essentialism would show large differences between such groups as:
Objectivists as a "cult" relative to mainstream 1960's philosophers.
Baraminologists as a "cult" relative to mainstream academic biologists.
The anti science faction in the American Anthropological Association as a traditionalist schismatic faction in Anthropology.
And perhaps in the reverse direction (with a novel tendency successfully invading an existing discipline), the takeover of political science by behaviorists in the 1950's and rational choice theorists in the 1980's.
This needs to be a post.