Abstract

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

Highlights

  • A parallel case can be made for the existence of word-kinds

  • As we want to hold that these claims are true, this provides a prima facie case that we should accept the existence of words qua kinds

  • It will be my contention that the word is what glues its tokens together, that words are important nodes in linguistic taxonomy just as species are in zoological taxonomy’ (2009: 106)

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Summary

THE METAPHYSICS OF SPECIES

Essentialism about species, drawing on a tradition back to Aristotle, holds that species are natural kinds, defined by their real essences, statable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for kind-membership. The HPC view seeks to explain how the kinds that we refer to ‘in inferences, explanations, and predictions are groups of entities or phenomena that are similar to one another but not perfectly the same’ (Ereshefsky and Reydon 2015: 970) It attempts to explain the typical traits of a kind, whilst rejecting the necessary and sufficient conditions required by essentialism. The kind may be able to preserve its identity despite a change in either the property cluster associated with that kind, or the mechanism that underlie that property cluster (Boyd 1999b: 144) Applying this view to species, under the HPC view, species cannot be defined through necessary and sufficient conditions. The HPC view will allow us to maintain a realist account of word-kinds, whilst accepting that those kinds are messy, historically delimited, non-eternal, and allow for exceptions – all features that I will argue word-kinds intuitively possess

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION
WHY MIGHT THERE BE WORD-KINDS AT ALL?
ESSENTIALISM ABOUT WORDS
WORDS AS HPCS
THE ONTOLOGY OF WORDS AND THE METAPHYSICS OF LANGUAGE
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