Putnam’s Doctrine of Natural Kind Words and Frege’s Doctrines of Sense, Reference and Extension: Can they Cohere?

1995 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
David Wiggins
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind

Law as a Malleable Artifact

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Schauer
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Way ◽  
Concept Of Law

Law is not a natural kind, but is instead an artifact. Like all artifacts, the artifact of law is created by human beings. But what human beings create can be re-created, and thus the artifact that is law is always open to modification or revision. And if law is open to modification or revision, then so too is our concept of it. This chapter explores the way in which one form of jurisprudential scholarship is that which seeks not to identify what our concept of law now is, but, rather, what our concept of law ought to be, in light of any number of moral or pragmatic goals.

Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Philosophical Significance

This chapter defends legal positivism against the backdrop of the assumption that law is an artifact, not a natural kind, and that it is an artifact whose nature does not depend on the intentions of a creator. It explores in more detail the philosophical significance of that fact, given the growing interest in that topic as reflected in this volume and offers a synoptic explanation of what makes that view of the nature of law so plausible. The chapter goes on to argue that even within the constraint imposed by the metaphysics of what law is, positivism satisfies the most important theoretical desiderata, including locating law within a naturalistic worldview.

scholarly journals Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the Philebus

Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

The Logic of Natural Kind Terms

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Lifeng Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms

Colloquium 5 The Birds and the Bees: Aristotle on the Biologcial Concept of ἀνάλογον

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-169
Author(s):  
Devin Henry
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Common Causes ◽  
Similar Location ◽  
Different Parts ◽  
Second Analogy

In this paper I examine Aristotle’s biological use of the concept of analogy. On the reading I defend, biological analogues are parts that realize the same capacity of soul or occupy a similar location in the animals whose parts they are but are not specific (“more-and-less”) modifications of the same underlying material substratum. The concept of analogy serves two principal functions in Aristotle’s biology. First, Aristotle uses analogy as a tool for classifying animals into separate natural kinds (Part 3). Second, analogy plays an explanatory role in which the same causal explanation is transferred to “φ and its analogue” (Part 4). Here the function of analogy is to group different parts into a single explanatory class unified on the basis of shared causes. One of the upshots of my interpretation is that, while analogical unity may allow us to posit a common explanation for φ and its analogue, it is not grounds for treating the class of animals that ­possess those parts as a natural kind. For Aristotle, natural kinds are groups whose shared similarities must result from common causes operating on a common material substratum.


scholarly journals A pluralist account of knowledge as a natural kind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Cognitive Ethology ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Hilary Kornblith

In an attempt to address some long-standing issues of epistemology, Hilary Kornblith proposes that knowledge is a natural kind the identification of which is the unique responsibility of one particular science: cognitive ethology. As Kornblith sees it, the natural kind thus picked out is knowledge as construed by reliabilism. Yet the claim that cognitive ethology has this special role has not convinced all critics. The present article argues that knowledge plays a causal and explanatory role within many of our more fruitful current theories, diverging from the reliabilist conception even in disciplines that are closely related to cognitive ethology, and thus still dealing with knowledge as a natural as opposed to a social phenomenon, where special attention will be given to cognitive neuroscience. However, rather than discarding the natural kind approach altogether, it is argued that many of Kornblith’s insights can in fact be preserved within a framework that is both naturalist and pluralist.

scholarly journals The Psychology of Natural Kind Terms

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Foster-Hanson ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms

Draft of chapter to appear in: The Psychology of Natural Kinds Terms. In S.T. Biggs, & H. Geirsson (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook on Linguistic Reference. London: Routledge.

The World Essence

Dialogue ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bigelow
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Joint Paper ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Necessity

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member.

What Are Natural Kinds?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Soames
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
General Term ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
World State ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Ontological Question

This chapter approaches the ontological question, “What are natural kinds?” through another, partially linguistic, question. “What must natural kinds be like if the conventional wisdom about natural kind terms is correct?” Although answering this question will not tell us everything we want to know, it will, be useful in narrowing the range of feasible ontological alternatives. The chapter summarizes the contemporary linguistic wisdom and then tests different proposals about kinds against it. It takes simple natural kind terms—like “green,” “gold,” “water,” “tiger,” and “light”—to be Millian terms that rigidly designate properties typically determined by a reference-fixing stipulation to the effect that the general term is to designate whatever property provides the explanation of why, at actual world-state, all, or nearly all, the samples of items associated with the term by speakers who introduce it have the observational properties they do.

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