Abstract
Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on Kripke’s and Putnam’s considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz’s arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too (and, arguably, for common nouns in general), or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary.
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Notes
The principle is, in fact, a consequence of a much more general one, which certainly drove Kaplan and which may also be called Semantic Uniformity. Briefly: same syntactic category, same semantical treatment. In what follows, however, my only concern will be the syntactic (lexical) category of common nouns.
A terminological remark. Throughout the paper, my use of “semantics” and its cognates will be intended to be broad, to cover not only semantically proper but also metasemantic issues. Thus, for example, when I say that natural kind terms and artifactual kind terms are semantically on a par, I mean not only that they have the same type of semantic value, but also that they come to have their semantic value by the same types of processes or mechanisms. On the taxonomical distinction between semantics and metasemantics, see Kaplan (1989: 573-576).
For an attempt more or less in this direction (though wisely appealing to clusters rather than definitions) see for example Wikforss (2010).
Actually, Russell went even further, as he claimed that even different tokens of the same name work differently:
Suppose some statement is made about Bismarck. Assuming that there is such a thing as direct acquaintance with oneself, Bismarck himself might have used his name directly to designate the particular person with whom he was acquainted. In this case, if he made a judgment about himself, he himself might be a constituent of the judgment. Here the proper name has the direct use which it always wishes to have, as simply standing for a certain object, and not for a description of the object. But if a person who knew Bismarck made a judgment about him, the case is different. (Russell 1911: 170)
Interestingly, even Stephen P. Schwartz, who, as we shall see below, is one of the main critics of Semantic Uniformity, in at least one place (2006: 281-282) seems to suggest that a “unified” theory would be desirable.
Consider also the following passage:
It seems that there is a strong tendency for words which are introduced as ‘one-criterion’ words to develop a ‘natural-kind’ sense, with all the concomitant rigidity and indexicality. In the case of artifact-names, this natural-kind sense seems to be the predominant one. (Putnam 1975: 244)
Though predominant, the natural-kind sense is thus not the only sense, according to Putnam.
Instead, Semantic Uniformity is apparently endorsed in Almog (1984: 54-58) and Martí & Martínez-Fernández (2010: 55-56), but without any discussion of Schwartz’s and others’ arguments. On the contrary, Marconi (2013) argues that not even the subclass of common nouns constituted by artifactual kind terms is semantically uniform.
See Donnellan (1970: 342-343) and Kripke (1972: 81) for the argument from ignorance; Donnellan (1970: 347-349) and Kripke (1972: 83-85) for the argument from error. In “A puzzle about belief,” Kripke writes that the argument from ignorance is “the clearest objection” (1979: 246) to the description theory.
This does not mean, of course, that what Putnam writes about what he calls the division of linguistic labor (1975: 227-229) is not of great importance for understanding various linguistic phenomena. But in the quoted passage he seems to conflate the constitutive sense and the epistemic sense of “determination.” Whereas the real world plays a constitutive role in that it contributes to make the case that natural kind terms have the extension they have (see below), the society plays only an epistemic role, since speakers can appeal to other society’s members (the experts) to ascertain the extensions those terms already have. On the distinction between these two senses of “determination,” see Bach (2005: 43) and Neale (2016: 266-273).
In speaking of the extension of “beech” I only mean here the set of individuals which the word applies to (is true of). I am not committing myself to its being a, even less the, semantic value of the word.
As a consequence, natural kind terms rigidly designate natural kinds. The issue of natural kind terms rigidity has attracted a lot of attention – way too much, in my opinion – in recent years. Schwartz himself has criticized an approach to it similar to the one I have just mentioned (defended, for example, in Martí & Martínez-Fernández 2010), which he calls “rigid expressionism,” in various places (see Schwartz 1980b, 2020, and 2021). However, his main criticism is that rigid expressionism “fails to provide any way of distinguishing natural kind terms from non-natural kind terms” (1980b: 190): “The problem with rigid expressionism … is that it runs together natural kind terms with non-natural kind terms in a false semantic uniformity” (2021: 2959, italics mine). But, as Devitt (2020: 416) stresses, “it is not the task of such a notion [rigidity] to distinguish natural from non-natural kind terms.” What’s more, as I am arguing in this paper, Schwartz has never been able to show that the resulting semantic uniformity is “false.”
In fact, in my opinion the most sensible way to resist my defense of Semantic Uniformity is to claim that there are no artifactual or other non-natural kinds at all. Schwartz, however, considers this a “highly controversial metaphysical thesis” to which he does not want to commit himself: “Lawyer, bachelor, and pencil are not natural kinds, of course, but this is not to say that they are not kinds at all” (1980b: 192).
Sometimes, philosophers use the word “universal” in this context (see for example Martí & Martínez-Fernández 2010). I prefer to steer away from this terminology, to avoid misunderstandings due to the long-standing debate over the nature of universals. I take kinds to be real world entities.
However, scientists are often also deeply involved in technology and require technology to be properly run. Hence, they must care about non-natural (artifactual!) kinds as well. (I thank an anonymous referee for this point.)
Since I was interested in showing that, even if Schwartz’s first claim were true, Semantic Uniformity would not be in danger, I did not question it. However, let me add here that the idea that pencils do not have a common nature, namely that pencils form only a “nominal” kind, seems to me highly dubious. This is obviously not the place to undertake a detailed investigation of the metaphysics of artifacts (which, by the way, may well be substantially different for different kinds of artifacts: compare LSD and sofas), but I want to quote the following considerations by Tyler Burge, which I find extremely convincing:
there are perceptible, artifactual, and social kinds …. I do not agree that such … kinds are “ideal” or merely practical. I do not agree that they are in any sense constructed by us. Of course, most artifacts are dependent on our intentionally making them, causing them to come into existence more or less according to some plan. Once made, the artifacts are what they are, regardless of how we regard them. An amplifier is not a kind of thing only by courtesy of our “projecting” a principle of unity whose reality lies entirely in our projection.
We fix on and represent kinds, features, and relations in the world. Often our representations reflect interests and needs special to us. One should not, however, conclude that since we represent a pattern only because it corresponds to some need or interest of ours that [sic] the pattern is a product or projection from our needs or representational abilities. The world is made up of individuals that instantiate a rich, hierarchical, cross-quilt of patterns made up of properties, relations, kinds. Science deals with those that submit to relatively deep explanatory systematization. But pattern is not less real by being local, or by being perceptible only by certain sensory modalities, or by being constitutively dependent on causal processes that do not fall under the systematic principles of some science. The realities that we represent are largely independent of our “projecting” principles of unity. The unities and similarities that we make use of are for the most part quite independent of us, even where they are of special interest to us, and might be of no interest to some other species. (2003: 318-319).
For some other interesting considerations on “culturally generated kinds,” see Elder (1989), which also contains a discussion of Schwartz’s arguments. Some of its conclusions converge with those I am proposing here.
Perhaps the biggest among these is the so-called Qua-problem (Devitt & Sterelny 1999: 90-93).
I presented an ancestor of this paper at the Logos Workshop on Artifacts: Semantics and Metaphysics (Barcelona, May 2013) and at the XXIII Congresso Nazionale della Società Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (Bologna, January 2017). I am grateful to Genoveva Martí and Paolo Leonardi for inviting me, respectively, to the first and to the second event, and to all those who gave me feedback on those occasions. Special thanks are due to Joseph Almog for the many discussions on these issues, and to Michael Devitt, Alfonso Frijio, Paolo Leonardi again, Diego Marconi, Ernesto Napoli, Paul Nichols, Marco Santambrogio, and Stephen Schwartz for their comments on previous drafts.
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Bianchi, A. Kind terms and semantic uniformity. Philosophia 50, 7–17 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00433-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00433-4