Results for 'Natural kinds'

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  1. Scientific enquiry and natural kinds: from planets to mallards.P. D. Magnus - 2012 - New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    Some scientific categories seem to correspond to genuine features of the world and are indispensable for successful science in some domain; in short, they are natural kinds. This book gives a general account of what it is to be a natural kind and puts the account to work illuminating numerous specific examples.
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  2. Natural Kinds, Psychiatric Classification and the History of the DSM.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2016 - History of Psychiatry 27 (4):406-424.
    This paper addresses philosophical issues concerning whether mental disorders are natural kinds and how the DSM should classify mental disorders. I argue that some mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, depression) are natural kinds in the sense that they are natural classes constituted by a set of stable biological mechanisms. I subsequently argue that a theoretical and causal approach to classification would provide a superior method for classifying natural kinds than the purely descriptive approach adopted (...)
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  3. Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice.Catherine Kendig (ed.) - 2016 - Routledge.
    This edited volume of 13 new essays aims to turn past discussions of natural kinds on their head. Instead of presenting a metaphysical view of kinds based largely on an unempirical vantage point, it pursues questions of kindedness which take the use of kinds and activities of kinding in practice as significant in the articulation of them as kinds. The book brings philosophical study of current and historical episodes and case studies from various scientific disciplines (...)
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    Are Natural Kinds and Natural Properties Distinct?Emma Tobin - 2013 - In Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics and Science. Oxford University Press. pp. 164-182.
    This chapter discusses the distinction between natural kinds and natural properties. Some theorists deny the distinction, and claim that natural kinds can be identified with properties. For example, natural kinds might be understood as the perfectly natural properties, reducible to properties or the extensions of properties. Alternatively, one might argue that natural kinds and natural properties are distinct and that natural kinds could be considered as a sui (...)
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  5. Natural Kinds.Zdenka Brzović - 2018 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    A large part of our exploration of the world consists in categorizing or classifying the objects and processes we encounter, both in scientific and everyday contexts. There are various, perhaps innumerable, ways to sort objects into different kinds or categories, but it is commonly assumed that, among the countless possible types of classifications, one group is privileged. Philosophy refers to such categories as natural kinds. Standard examples of such kinds include fundamental physical particles, chemical elements, and (...)
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  6. Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change.Joseph LaPorte - 2003 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    According to the received tradition, the language used to to refer to natural kinds in scientific discourse remains stable even as theories about these kinds are refined. In this illuminating book, Joseph LaPorte argues that scientists do not discover that sentences about natural kinds, like 'Whales are mammals, not fish', are true rather than false. Instead, scientists find that these sentences were vague in the language of earlier speakers and they refine the meanings of the (...)
  7. Nondescriptionality and natural kind terms.Barbara Abbott - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (3):269 - 291.
    The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms (...)
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  8. Natural kinds as categorical bottlenecks.Laura Franklin-Hall - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (4):925-948.
    Both realist and anti-realist accounts of natural kinds possess prima facie virtues: realists can straightforwardly make sense of the apparent objectivity of the natural kinds, and anti-realists, their knowability. This paper formulates a properly anti-realist account designed to capture both merits. In particular, it recommends understanding natural kinds as ‘categorical bottlenecks,’ those categories that not only best serve us, with our idiosyncratic aims and cognitive capacities, but also those of a wide range of alternative (...)
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  9. Are natural kind terms special?Åsa Wikforss - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. Routledge.
    It is commonly assumed that natural kind terms constitute a distinct semantic category. This idea emerged during the 1970's following Kripke's and Putnam's well-known remarks on natural kind terms. The idea has stayed with us, although it is now recognized that the issues are considerably more complex than initially thought. Thus, it has become clear that much of Kripke's and Putnam's discussions were based on rather simplified views of natural kinds. It also turns out that the (...)
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  10. Rigidity, natural kind terms and metasemantics.Corine Besson - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. Routledge. pp. 25--44.
    A paradigmatic case of rigidity for singular terms is that of proper names. And it would seem that a paradigmatic case of rigidity for general terms is that of natural kind terms. However, many philosophers think that rigidity cannot be extended from singular terms to general terms. The reason for this is that rigidity appears to become trivial when such terms are considered: natural kind terms come out as rigid, but so do all other general terms, and in (...)
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  11. Natural kinds and literary accomplishments.Michael Ghiselin - 1980 - Michigan Quarterly Review 19:73-88.
     
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  12. Natural kinds as nodes in causal networks.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2018 - Synthese 195 (4):1379-1396.
    In this paper I offer a unified causal account of natural kinds. Using as a starting point the widely held view that natural kind terms or predicates are projectible, I argue that the ontological bases of their projectibility are the causal properties and relations associated with the natural kinds themselves. Natural kinds are not just concatenations of properties but ordered hierarchies of properties, whose instances are related to one another as causes and effects (...)
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  13.  44
    Natural Kinds and Concept Eliminativism.Samuli Pöyhönen - 2013 - In Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), Epsa11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science. Springer. pp. 167--179.
    Recently in the philosophy of psychology it has been suggested that several putative phenomena such as emotions, memory, or concepts are not genuine natural kinds and should therefore be eliminated from the vocabulary of scientific psychology. In this paper I examine the perhaps most well known case of scientific eliminativism, Edouard Machery’s concept eliminativism. I argue that the split-lump-eliminate scheme of con- ceptual change underlying Machery’s eliminativist proposal assumes a simplistic view of the functioning of scientific concepts. Conceiving (...)
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  14. Natural kinds terms.Kim Sterelny - 1983 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (2):100-125.
  15. Natural Kind Essentialism Revisited.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2015 - Mind 124 (495):795-822.
    Recent work on Natural Kind Essentialism has taken a deflationary turn. The assumptions about the grounds of essentialist truths concerning natural kinds familiar from the Kripke-Putnam framework are now considered questionable. The source of the problem, however, has not been sufficiently explicated. The paper focuses on the Twin Earth scenario, and it will be demonstrated that the essentialist principle at its core (which I call IDENT)—that necessarily, a sample of a chemical substance, A, is of the same (...)
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  16. Natural Kinds and Concepts: A Pragmatist and Methodologically Naturalistic Account.Ingo Brigandt - 2011 - In Jonathan Knowles & Henrik Rydenfelt (eds.), Pragmatism, Science and Naturalism. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishing. pp. 171-196.
    In this chapter I lay out a notion of philosophical naturalism that aligns with pragmatism. It is developed and illustrated by a presentation of my views on natural kinds and my theory of concepts. Both accounts reflect a methodological naturalism and are defended not by way of metaphysical considerations, but in terms of their philosophical fruitfulness. A core theme is that the epistemic interests of scientists have to be taken into account by any naturalistic philosophy of science in (...)
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  17.  91
    Natural kinds: Direct reference, realism, and the impossibility of necessary a posteriori truth.Chenyang Li - 1993 - Review of Metaphysics 47 (2):261-76.
    SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED that water is H2O. Water is H2O is true. But is it a necessary truth? In other words, is it true in all possible worlds? Some people think it is. For example Hilary Putnam, in his well-known Twin Earth argument, concludes that "water is H2O" is necessarily true; thus a liquid which phenomenally resembles H2O and fits the description of water in almost all aspects, but has the chemical formula XYZ, cannot be water. Saul Kripke has made (...)
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  18.  58
    Kant, Natural Kind Terms, and Scientific Essentialism.Erik Anderson - 1994 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (4):355 - 373.
    What, for Kant, is the semantic status of the proposition: Water is H2O? Is it analytic or synthetic? The question is not one of merely esoteric import since an answer to it would constitute a statement about the meaningfulness of all our scientific propositions. And, insofar as the Critique is a defense of the possibility of the natural sciences, it seems that we should be able to find in it the answer to our question. Further, we should be able (...)
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  19. Empty natural kind terms and dry earth.Corine Besson - 2012 - Erkenntnis 76 (3):403-425.
    This paper considers the problem of assigning meanings to empty natural kind terms. It does so in the context of the Twin-Earth externalist-internalist debate about whether the meanings of natural kind terms are individuated by the external physical environment of the speakers using these terms. The paper clarifies and outlines the different ways in which meanings could be assigned to empty natural kind terms. And it argues that externalists do not have the semantic resources to assign them (...)
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  20.  99
    Natural Kinds, Social Constructions, and Ordinary Language: Clarifying the Crisis in the Science of Emotion.Cecilea Mun - 2016 - Journal of Social Ontology 2 (2):247-269.
    I argue for the importance of clarifying the distinction between metaphysical, semantic, and meta-semantic concerns regarding what Emotion is. This allows us to see that those involved in the Scientific Emotion Project and the Folk Emotion Project are in fact involved in the same project – the Science of Emotion. It also helps us understand why questions regarding the natural kind status of Emotion, as well as answers to questions regarding the value of ordinary language emotion terms or concepts (...)
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  21. Natural Kinds and Crosscutting Categories.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 1998 - Journal of Philosophy 95 (1):33.
    There are many ways of construing the claim that some categories are more “natural" than others. One can ask whether a system of categories is innate or acquired by learning, whether it pertains to a natural phenomenon or to a social institution, whether it is lexicalized in natural language or requires a compound linguistic expression. This renders suspect any univocal answer to this question in any particular case. Yet another question one can ask, which some authors take (...)
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  22. Natural kinds.Willard V. Quine - 1969 - In Jaegwon Kim & Ernest Sosa (eds.), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press. pp. 114-38.
     
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  23. Crosscutting natural kinds and the hierarchy thesis.Emma Tobin - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. Routledge. pp. 1--179.
     
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  24. The Natural Kind Status of Emotion.Louis C. Charland - 2002 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (4):511-37.
    It has been argued recently that some basic emotions should be considered natural kinds. This is different from the question whether as a class emotions form a natural kind; that is, whether emotion is a natural kind. The consensus on that issue appears to be negative. I argue that this pessimism is unwarranted and that there are in fact good reasons for entertaining the hypothesis that emotion is a natural kind. I interpret this to mean (...)
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  25. Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change.Joseph Laporte - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (221):672-674.
     
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  26. Naturalizing Kinds.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2013 - In Bana Bashour Hans Muller (ed.), Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and its Implications. Routledge. pp. 115.
    Naturalism about natural kinds is the view that they are none other than the kinds discoverable by science. This thesis is in tension with what is perhaps the dominant contemporary view of natural kinds: essentialism. According to essentialism, natural kinds constitute a small subset of our scientific categories, namely those definable in terms of intrinsic, microphysical properties, which are possessed necessarily rather than contingently by their bearers. Though essentialism may appear compatible with naturalism, (...)
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  27. Natural kinds.Alexander Bird & Emma Tobin - 2008 - In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  28.  76
    Against natural kind eliminativism.Stijn Conix & Pei-Shan Chi - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8999-9020.
    It has recently been argued that the concept of natural kinds should be eliminated because it does not play a productive theoretical role and even harms philosophical research on scientific classification. We argue that this justification for eliminativism fails because the notion of ‘natural kinds’ plays another epistemic role in philosophical research, namely, it enables fruitful investigation into non-arbitrary classification. It does this in two ways: first, by providing a fruitful investigative entry into scientific classification; and (...)
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  29.  92
    Natural kinds.Emma Tobin & Alexander Bird - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  30. Natural kind terms again.Panu Raatikainen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-17.
    The new externalist picture of natural kind terms due to Kripke, Putnam, and others has become quite popular in philosophy. Many philosophers of science have remained sceptical. Häggqvist and Wikforss have recently criticised this view severely. They contend it depends essentially on a micro-essentialist view of natural kinds that is widely rejected among philosophers of science, and that a scientifically reasonable metaphysics entails the resurrection of some version of descriptivism. It is argued in this paper that the (...)
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  31. Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight.Ian Hacking - 2007 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 61:203-239.
    The rosy dawn of my title refers to that optimistic time when the logical concept of a natural kind originated in Victorian England. The scholastic twilight refers to the present state of affairs. I devote more space to dawn than twilight, because one basic problem was there from the start, and by now those origins have been forgotten. Philosophers have learned many things about classification from the tradition of natural kinds. But now it is in disarray and (...)
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  32. Natural Kinds: (Thick) Essentialism or Promiscuous Realism?Nigel Leary - 2007 - Philosophical Writings 34 (1):5 - 13.
    Theoretical identity statements of the form "water is H2O‟ are allegedly necessary truths knowable a posteriori, and assert that nothing could be water and not be H2O. The necessary a posteriori nature of these identity claims has been taken by Kripke, Putnam and Donnellan to justify a move from talk of reference (language) to talk of essence (metaphysics), and has motivated much of contemporary essentialism. In this paper I will contest this move from reference to essence, and argue that (i.) (...)
     
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  33. Natural Kinds.W. V. O. Quine - 1969 - In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. pp. 5.
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  34. Natural kinds and manifest forms of life.J. Van Brakel - 1992 - Dialectica.
  35.  16
    Natural kinds: a new synthesis.Anouk Barberousse, Françoise Longy, Francesca Merlin & Stéphanie Ruphy - 2020 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 35 (3):365-387.
    What is a natural kind? This old yet lasting philosophical question has recently received new competing answers (e.g., Chakravartty, 2007; Magnus, 2014; Khalidi, 2013; Slater, 2015; Ereshefsky & Reydon, 2015). We show that the main ingredients of an encompassing and coherent account of natural kinds are actually on the table, but in need of the right articulation. It is by adopting a non-reductionist, naturalistic and non-conceptualist approach that, in this paper, we elaborate a new synthesis of all (...)
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  36. Natural Kinds, Causal Relata and Causal Relations.Emma Tobin - unknown
    Realist accounts of natural kinds rely on an account of causation where the relata of causal relations are real and discrete. These views about natural kinds entail very different accounts of causation. In particular, the necessity of the causal relation given the instantiation of the properties of natural kinds is more robust in the fundamental sciences (e.g. physics and chemistry) than it is in the life sciences (e.g. biology and the medical sciences). In this (...)
     
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  37. Natural kinds in biology.Mark Ereshefsky - manuscript
    It is commonly held that objects in the world form natural kinds. Rabbits form a natural kind and so do all pieces of gold. The traditional account of natural kinds asserts that the members of a kind share a common essence. The essence of gold, for example, is its unique atomic structure. That structure occurs in all and only pieces of gold, and it is a property that all pieces of gold must have.
     
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  38. Natural Kinds.W. V. O. Quine - 1991 - In Richard Boyd, Philip Gasper & J. D. Trout (eds.), The Philosophy of Science. MIT Press. pp. 159--170.
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  39. Realism, natural kinds, and philosophical methods.Richard Boyd - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. Routledge. pp. 212--234.
  40. Depression and Suicide are Natural Kinds: Implications for Physician-Assisted Suicide.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2013 - International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 36 (5-6):461-470.
    In this article, I argue that depression and suicide are natural kinds insofar as they are classes of abnormal behavior underwritten by sets of stable biological mechanisms. In particular, depression and suicide are neurobiological kinds characterized by disturbances in serotonin functioning that affect various brain areas (i.e., the amygdala, anterior cingulate, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus). The significance of this argument is that the natural (biological) basis of depression and suicide allows for reliable projectable inferences (i.e., predictions) (...)
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  41.  64
    Natural Kinds, Mind Independence, and Defeasibility.Marc Ereshefsky - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (5):845-856.
    A standard requirement on natural kinds is that they be mind independent. However, many kinds in the human and social sciences, even the natural sciences, depend on human thought. This article suggests that the mind independence requirement on natural kinds be replaced with the requirement that natural kind classifications be defeasible. The defeasibility requirement does not require that natural kinds be mind independent, so it does not exclude mind dependent scientific (...) from being natural kinds. Furthermore, the defeasibility requirement captures the idea that natural kind classifications are tools for investigating the empirical world. (shrink)
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  42. Natural Kinds in Evolution and Systematics: Metaphysical and Epistemological Considerations.Ingo Brigandt - 2009 - Acta Biotheoretica 57 (1-2):77-97.
    Despite the traditional focus on metaphysical issues in discussions of natural kinds in biology, epistemological considerations are at least as important. By revisiting the debate as to whether taxa are kinds or individuals, I argue that both accounts are metaphysically compatible, but that one or the other approach can be pragmatically preferable depending on the epistemic context. Recent objections against construing species as homeostatic property cluster kinds are also addressed. The second part of the paper broadens (...)
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  43.  74
    Natural Kind Terms Are Similar to Proper Names in Being World-Independent.Ari Maunu - 2002 - Philosophical Writings 19:51-68.
    According to the New Theory of Reference, proper names (and indexicals) and natural kind terms are semantically similar to each other but crucially different from definite descriptions and “ordinary” predicates, respectively. New Theorists say that a name, unlike a definite description, is a directly referential nondescriptional rigid designator, which refers “without a mediation of the content” and is not functional (i.e. lacks a Carnapian intension). Natural kind terms, such as ‘horse’ and ‘water’, are held to have similar distinctions, (...)
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  44. Natural Kindness.Matthew H. Slater - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (2):375-411.
    Philosophers have long been interested in a series of interrelated questions about natural kinds. What are they? What role do they play in science and metaphysics? How do they contribute to our epistemic projects? What categories count as natural kinds? And so on. Owing, perhaps, to different starting points and emphases, we now have at hand a variety of conceptions of natural kinds—some apparently better suited than others to accommodate a particular sort of inquiry. (...)
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  45. Naming natural kinds.Åsa Maria Wikforss - 2005 - Synthese 145 (1):65-87.
    This paper discusses whether it can be known a priori that a particular term, such as water, is a natural kind term, and how this problem relates to Putnams claim that natural kind terms require an externalist semantics. Two conceptions of natural kind terms are contrasted: The first holds that whether water is a natural kind term depends on its a priori knowable semantic features. The second.
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  46. Are Acids Natural Kinds?Pieter Thyssen - manuscript
    Are acids natural kinds? Or are they merely relevant kinds? Although acidity has been one of the oldest and most important concepts in chemistry, surprisingly little ink has been spilled on the natural kind question. I approach the question from the perspective of microstructural essentialism. After explaining why both Brønsted acids and Lewis acids are considered functional kinds, I address the challenges of multiple realization and multiple determination. Contra Manafu and Hendry, I argue that the (...)
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  47.  52
    Natural Kinds, Causal Profile and Multiple Constitution.Max Kistler - 2018 - Metaphysica 19 (1):113-135.
    The identity of a natural kind can be construed in terms of its causal profile. This conception is more appropriate to science than two alternatives. The identity of a natural kind is not determined by one causal role because one natural kind can have many causal roles and several functions and because some functions are shared by different kinds. Furthermore, the microstructuralist thesis is wrong: The identity of certain natural kinds is not determined by (...)
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  48. Natural Kinds & Symbiosis.Emma Tobin - unknown
    Biological species are often taken as counterexamples to essentialist accounts of natural kinds. Essentialists like Ellis (2001) agree with nominalists that because biological kinds evolve, any distinctions between kinds of biological kind must ultimately be arbitrary. The resulting vagueness in the extension of natural kind predicates in the case of species has led to the claim that species ought to be construed as individuals rather than kinds (Ghiselin 1974, 1987; Hull 1976, 1978). I examine (...)
     
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  49. Natural Kinds and the Problem of Complex Essences.Travis Dumsday - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (4):619-634.
    Natural-kind essentialism faces an important but neglected difficulty: the problem of complex essences (PCE). This is the question of how to account for the unity of an instantiated kind-essence when that essence consists of multiple distinct properties, some of which lack an inherent necessary connection between them. My central goal here is to propose an essentialism-friendly solution to this problem. Along the way I also employ some points from that solution to argue for the necessary truth of essentialism (necessary, (...)
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  50. Natural Kinds and Natural Kind Terms: Myth and Reality.Sören Häggqvist & Åsa Wikforss - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4):911-933.
    The article examines the role of natural kinds in semantic theorizing, which has largely been conducted in isolation from relevant work in science, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. We argue that the Kripke–Putnam account of natural kind terms, despite recent claims to the contrary, depends on a certain metaphysics of natural kinds; that the metaphysics usually assumed—micro-essentialism—is untenable even in a ‘placeholder’ version; and that the currently popular homeostatic property cluster theory of natural (...) is correct only to an extent that fails to vindicate the Kripke–Putnam account. This undermines the metasemantics required for anti-descriptivist semantics. _1_ Introduction _2_ From Semantics to Metaphysics _3_ Metaphysics, Part I: The Demise of Micro-essentialism _3.1_ Original micro-essentialism _3.2_ Placeholder essentialism _4_ Metaphysics, Part II: Homeostatic Property Cluster Theory _5_ Prospects for Natural Kind Term Semantics. (shrink)
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