Pluto and the ‘Planet Problem’: Folk Concepts and Natural Kinds in Astronomy

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisa Bokulich
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Planet Problem

Because Without Cause

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lange
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Scientific Explanations ◽  
Physical Necessity ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
Causal Laws

This chapter investigates non-causal scientific explanations that work by describing how the explanandum involves stronger-than-physical necessity by virtue of certain facts (“constraints”) that possess some variety of necessity stronger than ordinary causal laws possess. In particular, the chapter offers an account of the order of explanatory priority in explanations by constraint. It examines several important examples of explanations by constraint, distinguishing their natural kinds. It gives an account of the sense in which constraints are modally stronger than ordinary causal laws and an account of why certain deductions of constraints exclusively from other constraints possess explanatory power whereas others lack explanatory power.

Mechanisms, Models, and Kinds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Multiple Models

This chapter explores how mechanisms and their constituents can be classified into kinds. It argues for a weakly realist account of natural kinds—one which suggests that classification into kinds is based upon real similarities between instances of those kinds, but which denies that kinds have essences or have some reality apart from their instances. I introduce a models-first account of kinds, which suggests that two things are of the same kind to the extent that they can be represented by the same model. Because target entities can be represented by multiple models, they will belong to multiple kinds. I illustrate the approach by showing how the entities and activities that make up mechanisms can be classified into kinds.

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.

scholarly journals ON THE DOCTRINE OF NATURAL KINDS

Mind ◽  
1887 ◽  
Vol os-12 (47) ◽  
pp. 434-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. H. TOWBY
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds

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 Natural kinds of mental disorder

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sander Werkhoven
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Mental Disorder ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Health Problems ◽  
Abnormal Behaviour ◽  
Diagnostic Categories ◽  
Socially Constructed

AbstractAre mental disorders (autism, ADHD, schizophrenia) natural kinds or socially constructed categories? What is at stake if either of these views prove to be true? This paper offers a qualified defence for the view that there may be natural kinds of mental disorder, but also that the implications of this claim are generally overestimated. Especially concerns about over-inclusiveness of diagnostic categories and medicalisation of abnormal behaviour are not addressed by the debate. To arrive at these conclusions the paper opens with a discussion of kind formation in science, followed by an analysis of natural kinds. Seven principled and empirically informed objections to the possibility of natural kinds of mental disorder are considered and rejected. The paper ends with a reflection on diagnostics of mental health problems that don’t fall into natural kinds. Despite the defence of the possibility of natural kinds of mental disorder, this is likely to be the majority of cases.

Natural Kinds

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Cluster Theory ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Homeostatic Property Cluster ◽  
Natural Groups ◽  
Scientific Classification

Science posits entities that are neither individuals nor properties but kinds of individuals that share a number of distinct properties. Philosophers have designated them “natural kinds” and have held different views about how to distinguish them from arbitrary collections of individuals. The doctrine of “kinds” or “natural groups” was first explicitly introduced by nineteenth-century philosophers interested in taxonomy or scientific classification and continues to be the subject of lively debate in contemporary philosophy. After canvassing some of the philosophical controversies regarding natural kinds, the article presents two influential contemporary theories of natural kinds: essentialism and the homeostatic property cluster theory. The article goes on to defend naturalism, which is more in tune with the findings of modern science.

scholarly journals The hermeneutics of mental symptoms in the Cambridge School

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Aragona ◽  
Ivana S. Marková
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Therapeutic Interventions ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
New Model ◽  
Mental Symptom ◽  
Cultural Information ◽  
Mental Symptoms ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Cambridge School ◽  
Symptom Formation

Current Psychiatry is in crisis. Decades of neuroscientific research have not yet delivered adequate explanations or treatments. One reason for this failure may be the wrongness of its central assumption, namely that mental symptoms and disorders are natural kinds. The Cambridge School has proposed that a new Epistemology must be constructed for Psychiatry, and that this should start with the development of a new model of mental symptom-formation. ‘Mental symptoms’ should be considered as hermeneutic co-constructions occurring in a intersubjective space created by the dialogue between sufferer and healer. Subjective experiences (caused either by neurobiological or psychosocial upheaval) penetrate the awareness of sufferers causing perplexity and/or distress. To understand, handle and communicate these experiences, sufferers proceed to configure them by means of templates borrowed from their own culture. Importantly, however, the same neurobiological information can be configured into different symptoms; and different neurobiological information into the same symptom. Therefore, ‘mental symptoms’ are dissimilar hybrid combinations of neurobiological and cultural information. To be ethical, therapeutic interventions must take into account such dissimilarities. Blind manipulation of the brain in all cases should be considered as counterproductive.

scholarly journals Shared understanding of color among congenitally blind and sighted adults

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Sein Kim ◽  
Brianna Aheimer ◽  
Veronica Montane Manrara ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Stop Sign ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
Blind Individuals

Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind could only acquire shallow, fragmented facts about color. Contrary to this intuition, we report that blind and sighted people share an in-depth understanding of color, despite disagreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to the sighted, blind individuals are less likely to generate ‘yellow’ for banana and ‘red’ for stop-sign. However, blind and sighted adults are equally likely to infer that two bananas (natural kinds) and two stop-signs (artifacts with functional colors) are more likely to have the same color than two cars (artifacts with non-functional colors), make similar inferences about novel objects’ colors, and provide similar causal explanations. We argue that people develop inferentially-rich and intuitive “theories” of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning people’s theories than their knowledge of verbal facts.

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