Concluding Notes

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-220
Author(s):  
Mario Gómez-Torrente
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Sensible Qualities

This chapter revisits from a synoptic perspective two of the main themes of the book. First, the critique of descriptivism based on indeterminacy cases and the proposal of mere roughly sufficient conditions for the reference fixing of demonstratives, proper names, and ordinary natural kind nouns. And second, the proposal that Arabic numerals, ordinary natural kind nouns, and adjectives for sensible qualities have, despite popular eliminativist arguments to the contrary, referents of a relatively ordinary nature appropriately determined in subtle ways by their associated reference-fixing conventions. The two themes of the book revisited in these concluding notes are related to an important part of the spirit of Kripke’s work on reference.

Roads to Reference

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Gómez-Torrente
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Sensible Qualities

How is it that words (such as “Aristotle”) come to stand for the things they stand for (such as Aristotle)? Is the thing that a word stands for, its reference, fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like “water,” “three,” and “red” refer to appropriate things, just as the word “Aristotle” refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. Arguments are then provided for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. The book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts, these words refer, respectively, to “ordinary kinds,” cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.

Natural Kinds

Philosophy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Bird
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Weather System ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Philosophical Questions

It appears to us that things in the natural world divide into different kinds. The most obvious examples come from biology. Cats are clearly distinct from mice; while both kinds show variation, all the cats are more similar to one another than they are to any mouse. We see different kinds of tree and different kinds of lichen. These are kinds that are apparent to any reasonably careful observer. Other kinds seem to be revealed by science. The chemical revolution gave us new ideas about what it is to be a chemical element, and in the subsequent decades many dozens of these different basic chemical kinds were revealed. The following century uncovered a multiplicity of different kinds of fundamental physical particle. While at a different set of scales, geologists distinguish different kinds of rock, meteorologists distinguish different kinds of weather system, and astronomers distinguish different kinds of galaxy. The philosophical questions that natural kinds generate can themselves be categorized into three types as they relate to metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. (It should be noted nonetheless that discussion of these questions quite rightly overlaps these fields. Consequently, works listed in this article may be relevant to further sections in addition to the ones they are listed under.) Here are examples of the philosophical questions surrounding natural kinds. Does the world itself genuinely have a structure of objective natural kinds, so that there are natural divisions of things by kinds? And do our actual natural classifications match those kinds? Or are what we take to be kinds merely the product of a particular non-objective perspective? How does a natural kind (or belonging to a natural kind) differ from other natural properties? In virtue of what do things group themselves into kinds? How is kind membership determined—for example, by necessary and sufficient conditions or by something else? Do, indeed, natural kinds have essences? Are there entities that are the natural kinds? Do our natural kind terms refer to such entities rather as names refer to objects? Is there a non-trivial way of spelling out the idea of rigid designation for natural kinds terms? Do the semantics of natural kind terms vindicate essentialism about kinds? Does what we discover about kinds in the special sciences (e.g., concerning chemical substances and biological species) support or undermine philosophical conceptions of kinds?

Understanding and Fluency

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Trout
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Voluntary Control ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Cognitive Activities ◽  
The Common ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient ◽  
Turn Over

Philosophy and psychology appeal to a sense of understanding, typically a feeling invoked to explain people’s choices. ‘Understanding’ seems loosely associated with properties like transparency (things we understand we can also introspect), or voluntary (cognitive) control (things we understand we can turn over in our mind). Research on attention and memory shows that many candidate cases of understanding lack properties like transparency and voluntary control. In fact, ‘understanding’ may denote an unprincipled stew of states, processes, capacities, and goals that are only occasionally present when philosophers, and ordinary folks, apply the term or concept. A unified account of understanding might be valuable, but understanding isn’t a natural kind or defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Any unity we find in understanding comes not from the involvement of common mechanisms across diverse cases, but rather of messy cognitive activities in the common goal of pursuing the truth.

scholarly journals Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophy of Language: A Defence of the Ambiguity Thesis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Katharine Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences

<p>In this thesis I employ the experimental method to inform three important debates within the philosophy of language. These three debates can loosely be characterised as the following: Strawsonianism vs. Russellianism about the meaning of definite descriptions (Chapter 2), Millianism vs. Descriptivism about the meaning of proper names (Chapter 3), and Internalism vs. Externalism about natural kind terms (Chapter 4). To investigate these debates I use surveys to test the intuitions of ordinary language users, that is, non-philosophers, about the meaning of various terms and phrases in natural language. This included New Zealand undergraduate students, students in China, and participants in the US in order to investigate any cross-cultural differences. The results of these three studies indicate substantial variation in the intuitions held among ordinary language users. I use this variation to defend an ambiguity thesis. According to this thesis, some terms and phrases as they occur in natural language (specifically, proper names, natural kind terms, and definite descriptions) have multiple meanings associated them. No one disambiguation is correct outside of a context of utterance. If the ambiguity thesis is accepted, various philosophical puzzles disappear. I will also address a number of objections that face the general program of this thesis.</p>

scholarly journals Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophy of Language: A Defence of the Ambiguity Thesis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Katharine Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences

<p>In this thesis I employ the experimental method to inform three important debates within the philosophy of language. These three debates can loosely be characterised as the following: Strawsonianism vs. Russellianism about the meaning of definite descriptions (Chapter 2), Millianism vs. Descriptivism about the meaning of proper names (Chapter 3), and Internalism vs. Externalism about natural kind terms (Chapter 4). To investigate these debates I use surveys to test the intuitions of ordinary language users, that is, non-philosophers, about the meaning of various terms and phrases in natural language. This included New Zealand undergraduate students, students in China, and participants in the US in order to investigate any cross-cultural differences. The results of these three studies indicate substantial variation in the intuitions held among ordinary language users. I use this variation to defend an ambiguity thesis. According to this thesis, some terms and phrases as they occur in natural language (specifically, proper names, natural kind terms, and definite descriptions) have multiple meanings associated them. No one disambiguation is correct outside of a context of utterance. If the ambiguity thesis is accepted, various philosophical puzzles disappear. I will also address a number of objections that face the general program of this thesis.</p>

Names and Natural Kind Terms

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Braun
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Do So

Names and natural kind terms have long been a major focus of debates about meaning and reference. This article discusses some of the theories and arguments that have appeared in those debates. It is remarkably difficult to say what names are (more exactly, proper names) without making controversial theoretical assumptions. This article does not attempt to do so here. It instead relies on paradigm examples that nearly all theorists would agree are proper names, for instance, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘London’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Pegasus’. All of the proper names that are discussed in the article are singular nouns that have no syntactic structure. Most of them refer to objects (for instance, people, cities, and planets), but some, such as ‘Pegasus’, apparently do not. The article begins with proper names and the question ‘What is the meaning of a proper name?’ It turns to natural kind terms later.

Nouns for Natural Kinds and the Problem of Arbitrariness

2019 ◽  
pp. 140-183
Author(s):  
Mario Gómez-Torrente
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Scientific Kinds

This chapter explains the “Kripke-Putnam orthodoxy” about the reference fixing of ordinary natural kind nouns, and some objections to it, especially “arbitrariness problems”: for example, a Kripke-Putnam baptism for “water” doesn’t discriminate between, say, H2O and P2O (H2O where the isotope of hydrogen involved is protium oxide, as in regular paradigms of water). The chapter presents a picture of reference fixing for natural kind nouns that refines the Kripke-Putnam picture and that appeals to sets of roughly sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. It is argued that on this picture the referents of ordinary natural kind nouns turn out to be “ordinary kinds,” kinds which are vague along dimensions along which scientific kinds are precise: the reference of “water” is “the ordinary kind water” rather than H2O or other scientifically identified kinds. It is argued that this suffices to dispose of the arbitrariness worry on a broadly Kripkean view.

Proper Names and Referential Indeterminacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-107
Author(s):  
Mario Gómez-Torrente
Keyword(s):  
Proper Names ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Main Criticism ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

This chapter begins with a critique of “causal descriptivist” theories and other theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for the reference of proper names. The main criticism appeals to examples of referential indeterminacy for names and argues that no foreseeable way of complicating a “causal” reference-fixing description or other kinds of necessary and sufficient conditions for reference will be extensionally correct for cases of indeterminacy. This leads to the postulation of a picture of reference fixing for name uses according to which this is governed by a set of roughly sufficient conditions for name reference and reference failure. A number of these conventions are stated, and it is argued that they yield extensionally correct predictions for several examples of name reference and reference failure appealed to earlier in the chapter, and no predictions in the cases of apparent indeterminacy.

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