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.