Abstract
The homeostatic property cluster theory (HPC) is widely influential for its ability to account for many natural-kind terms in the life sciences. However, the notion of homeostatic mechanism has never been fully explicated. In 2009, Carl Craver interpreted the notion in the sense articulated in discussions on mechanistic explanation and pointed out that the HPC account equipped with such notion invites interest-relativity. In this paper, we analyze two recent refinements on HPC: one that avoids any reference to the causes of the clustering of properties and one that replaces homeostatic mechanisms with causal networks represented by causal graphs. We argue that the former is too slender to account for some inductive inference in science and the latter, thicker account invites interest-relativity, as the original HPC does. This suggests that human interest will be an un-eliminative part of a satisfactory account of natural kindness. We conclude by discussing the implication of interest-relativity to the naturalness, reality, or objectivity of kinds and indicating an overlooked aspect of natural kinds that requires further studies.
Highlights
The homeostatic property cluster theory (HPC) was initially introduced by Richard Boyd in response to what he takes to be Ian Hacking’s (1991) ‘challenge’ that property-cluster kinds fail to count as natural kinds because, as far as they have fuzzy boundaries, “what puts things into a family is not nature but people in concert” (Boyd 1991, 128).1 In order to defend property-cluster kinds from this challenge and to find some natural bases for them, Boyd (1991) postulated the existence of a homeostatic mechanism capable of explaining why those properties are statistically associated with each other and shared by the members of a given kind
Carl Craver (2009) developed three challenges against HPC equipped with the notion of Strict Mechanisms (Strict HPC, hereafter), according to which the identification of mechanisms is highly dependent on our explanatory practices and, Strict HPC inherits the mark of human interest associated with Strict Mechanism; that is, the resulting taxonomy will be relative to the purpose of inquiry at hand
We argued that the notion of Strict Mechanism, which is widely employed in mechanistic explanation, is unsuited to clarify Boyd’s notion of homeostatic mechanism and, in turn, the HPC account of natural kinds
Summary
The homeostatic property cluster theory (HPC) was initially introduced by Richard Boyd in response to what he takes to be Ian Hacking’s (1991) ‘challenge’ that property-cluster kinds fail to count as natural kinds because, as far as they have fuzzy boundaries, “what puts things into a family is not nature but people in concert” (Boyd 1991, 128). In order to defend property-cluster kinds from this challenge and to find some natural bases for them, Boyd (1991) postulated the existence of a homeostatic mechanism capable of explaining why those properties are statistically associated with each other and shared by the members of a given kind. Carl Craver (2009) developed three challenges against HPC equipped with the notion of Strict Mechanisms (Strict HPC, hereafter), according to which the identification of mechanisms is highly dependent on our explanatory practices and, Strict HPC inherits the mark of human interest associated with Strict Mechanism; that is, the resulting taxonomy will be relative to the purpose of inquiry at hand.3 Another challenge to HPC was provided by Matthew Slater (2015), who argued that many putative natural kinds in the special sciences lack anything like a homeostatic mechanism. 3, we analyze Khalidi’s causal network node account (CNN)—which replaces the notion of mechanism with causal processes as captured by causal graphs—and argue that CNN faces the same difficulties as Strict HPC despite the employment of a looser notion of mechanism It is often pointed out that relativity to the purpose of inquiry is compatible with the naturalness, reality or objectivity of categories, we shall suggest that treating all interest-relative categories as ‘natural’ insofar as they are parasitic on some objective causal feature will miss pragmatic aspects of the notion of natural kinds
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