Natural Kinds Research Articles

Biological Essentialism, Projectable Human Kinds, and Psychiatric Classification

AbstractA minimal essentialism (“intrinsic biological essentialism”) about natural kinds is required to explain the projectability of human science terms. Human classifications that yield robust and ampliative projectable inferences refer to biological kinds. I articulate this argument with reference to an intrinsic essentialist account of homeostatic property cluster kinds. This account implies that human sciences (e.g., medicine, psychiatry) that aim to formulate predictive kind categories should classify biological kinds. Issues concerning psychiatric classification and pluralism are examined.

No, water (still) doesn’t have a microstructural essence (reply to Hoefer & Martí)

Häggqvist and Wikforss (2018) argued that in the case of so-called natural kind terms, semantic externalism relies on an untenable metaphysics of kinds: microessentialism. They further claimed that this metaphysics fails, for largely empirical reasons. Focussing on the case of water, Hoefer and Martí European Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 9, (2019) rejoin that suitably construed, microessentialism is correct. I argue that their defence of microessentialism fails.

How Strong Sustainability Became Safety

The core commitment of strong sustainability, SS, is that nature really is different: there are strict limits to the substitutability of natural and other kinds of capital. Initially, the threat to sustainability was perceived as human greed and impatience, and the goal of SS to address resource scarcity was to sustain resource stocks, the flow of environmental services, and/or the harvest for human benefit. For landscapes and ecosystems, the SS goal was preservation, often in a gestalt framing: preserved or not. Two developments beginning around the mid-20th century—increasing awareness of the variability of natural systems, and the revolutionary changes in thinking motivated by the study of complex dynamic systems, CDS—re-oriented SS toward Safety, i.e., minimizing exposure to risk defined as threat of harm. Around 2010, the sustainability agenda for CDS shifted from identifying early warning indicators enabling timely interventions to forestall adverse regime change to promoting resilience by expanding scale and encouraging patchwork patterns of systems in various stages of their adaptive cycles. Nevertheless, the need for natural resources to substitute for depleted exhaustibles suggests a continuing role for commercial agriculture, plantation forestry, and managed fisheries. I conclude with a paradox still to be resolved: the need for continued and increased production from renewable resources to replace depleted exhaustibles suggests SS-motivated management practices that seem obsolete from a CDS perspective.

Consciousness as a natural kind and the methodological puzzle of consciousness

A new research programme conceives of consciousness as a natural kind. One proposed virtue of this approach is that it can help resolve the methodological puzzle of consciousness, which involves distinguishing consciousness from cognitive access. The present article raises a novel problem for this approach. The problem is rooted in the fact that there may be episodes of conscious experience that have not been classified as such. I argue that conceiving of consciousness as a natural kind cannot distinguish consciousness from cognitive access.

Anti-kripkean intuitions: conceptualism versus essentialism

The article discusses Saul Kripke’s criticisms of the account of the reference of general names he called “descriptivism” and the considerations he advanced in favour of his own essentialist causal-historical account of the reference of natural kind terms. The alternative of conceptualism versus essentialism about the reference of general terms is explained in details. The case is made that most of the intuitions on which Kripke based his arguments are highly controversial, and the main examples he used to explain and support his views (such as examples of whales and fish, water and H20, gold, tigers, and unicorns) do not constitute a clear case for the preference of essentialism over conceptualism. Moreover, these examples can be modified in such ways that in the perspective of these modifications, Kripke’s essentialist construal turns out to be far-fetched and implausible, whereas a form of conceptualism (the cluster theory of reference) is tenable.

Natural kinds, mind-independence, and unification principles

There have been many attempts to determine what makes a natural kind real, chief among them is the criterion according to which natural kinds must be mind-independent. But it is difficult to specify this criterion: many supposed natural kinds have an element of mind-dependence. I will argue that the mind-independence criterion is nevertheless a good one, if correctly understood: the mind-independence criterion concerns the unification principles for natural kinds. Unification principles determine how natural kinds unify their properties, and only those natural kinds that have a mind-independent unification principle should be considered real.

Same-tracking real kinds in the social sciences

The kinds of real or natural kinds that support explanation and prediction in the social sciences are difficult to identify and track because they change through time, intersect with one another, and they do not always exhibit their properties when one encounters them. As a result, conceptual practices directed at these kinds will often refer in ways that are partial, equivocal, or redundant. To improve this epistemic situation, it is important to employ open-ended classificatory concepts, to understand when different research programs are tracking the same real kind, and to maintain an ongoing commitment to interact causally with real kinds to focus reference on those kinds. A tempting view of these non-idealized epistemic conditions should be avoided: that they signal an ontological structure of the social world so plentiful that it would permit ameliorated (norm-driven, conceptually engineered) classificatory schemes to achieve their normative aims regardless of whether they defer (in ways to be described) to real-kind classificatory schemes. To ground these discussions, the essay appeals to an overlooked convergence in the systematic naturalistic frameworks of Richard Boyd and Ruth Millikan.

Learning disability history: A guide to method for the prospective researcher

AbstractBackgroundHere, I examine the status of ‘learning disability’ as a basic concept. This kind of questioning may be thought a task for philosophy, or at least for ‘theory’ or ‘disability studies’.Materials and methodsI identify history instead as a discipline well placed to reveal the category errors that surround the concept.ResultsThese begin with the word ‘disability’ itself, which subliminally identifies learning disability as a natural impairment like physical and sensory impairment, rather than as the creation (unlike these latter) of human beings ourselves over the long historical term. The error of dealing with learning disability as if it were a natural kind is reinforced, in conventional histories, by trying to diagnose it retrospectively. I illustrate these points by taking certain major items of the psychologist's vocabulary—‘the mind’, logical reasoning, abstraction, development, normal intelligence and autism—and show briefly how such things do not exist in nature but, in both a conceptual and a material sense, have emerged from the long course of historical contingencies.ConclusionsMy examples demonstrate the need for and validity of a historical method specific to learning disability, which can radically expand the horizons for researchers and busy practitioners, and contribute to the liberation of people carrying learning disability labels.

Thomas Reid on Induction and Natural Kinds

I examine the views of Thomas Reid with respect to a certain version of the problem of induction: Why are inductions using natural kinds successful, and what justifies them? I argue that while both Reid holds a kind of conventionalist view about natural kinds, this conventionalism has a realistic component which allows him to answer both questions.

Authentication, scale-relativity, and relational kindhood

This paper proposes a new natural kinds framework according to which kindhood is relational, dynamic, and scale-relative. Reflecting on the ontogenesis of a scientific classification, I argue that there are two distinct conceptual stages to a scientific classification: a first stage in which enough entities and relations must be authenticated for kindhood to emerge and a second in which the nature of authenticated entities and relations is investigated. The new framework is scale-relative and explains both the changing nature of the entities and relations themselves as well as the changing nature of the classifications in which they are organised.

Extending the Explanatory Scope of Evolutionary Theory: The Origination of Historical Kinds in Biology and Culture

Two welcome extensions of evolutionary thinking have come to prominence over the last thirty years: the so-called “extended evolutionary synthesis” (EES) and debate about biological kinds and individuals. These two agendas have, however, remained orthogonal to one another. The EES has mostly restricted itself to widening the explanations of adaptation offered by the preceding “modern evolutionary synthesis” by including additional mechanisms of inheritance and variation; while discussion of biological kinds has turned toward philosophical questions of essential vs. contingent properties of life forms and realist vs. epistemological approaches to categorization and classification. Here we attempt to broaden the explanatory scope of evolutionary theory by linking these two agendas. We expand on the mechanistic orientation of the EES, using new understandings of networked systems of components in order to engage the distinct intellectual challenge of the origination of historical kinds. With this phrase we designate a subset of natural kinds that acquires, through evolutionary processes, a quasi-independent lineage-history. Such kinds emerge in both biology and culture, and we enlarge the limited number of historical kinds that have thus far been recognized in evolutionary biology in a series of paradigmatic exemplars, from genes and cell types to rituals and music. For each exemplar we discern specific mechanisms by which it arose and persists; comparing these, we suggest a general unity in the ways in which diverse historical kinds originate.

General-term rigidity is meaning constancy

Abstract It is often thought that some general terms or kind terms, in particular natural kind terms, are rigid designators, and that a properly extended notion of singular-term rigidity can help explain the behaviour of such general terms. In this article, I argue that the only legitimate notion of general-term rigidity is a trivial one and identify some crucial asymmetries between a posteriori necessary truths involving names and a posteriori necessary truths involving general terms. If we pay attention to these asymmetries, it becomes clear that attempts to draw a non-trivial rigid/non-rigid distinction for general terms are bound to fail to offer the explanations we expected. As opposed to singular terms, what is interesting about the behaviour of natural kind terms, even in modal contexts, cannot be accounted for by modal distinctions like rigidity/non-rigidity but must rather track non-modal features.

Bolzano's externalist semantics of natural kind terms

AbstractThrough a detailed explication of Bernard Bolzano's semantics of natural kind terms, I elucidate why and to what extent he should be recognized as a remarkable anticipator of semantic externalism. Bolzano deals with kind terms in a brief sub‐section of the first volume of his Theory of Science. He divides such terms into two sub‐categories, roughly corresponding to organic and inorganic kinds. It is Bolzano's account of inorganic kind terms, such as ‘gold’, that confers on him the status of an anticipator of semantic externalism. He argues that ‘gold’ may be used in a way such that the superficial attributes that language users associate with it merely serve to enable them to recognize its instances. They do not, however, constitute the idea designated by the term nor do they determine its extension. Instead, the term designates an idea representing gold's unknown inner attributes, which are causally responsible for its superficial attributes.

Modality, Capacities, and Intuition

Barbara Vetter has argued that the notion of a metaphysical possibility functions like a natural-kind concept that picks out whatever kind is instantiated by the large majority of paradigmatic examples. Vetter holds that proponents of such a view can reject appeals to intuition and a priori reasoning as ways of supporting claims about the extension of metaphysical possibility, and that the attractiveness of a natural-kind account is consequently undiminished by intuitive counterexamples. This paper argues that that is far from obvious. It may be true on a natural kind view that the claim that it is metaphysically possible that p can be established only on the basis of empirical evidence about which kind is instantiated by most paradigm examples and what the members of this kind are. However, that leaves open the possibility that intuition and a priori reasoning can be used to evaluate conditional claims of the following form: If the kind instantiated by most paradigm examples includes (fails to include) X, then it is possible (not possible) that p. If intuition and a priori considerations can be used in this manner, then they are relevant to the assessment of the natural-kind view. Keywords: modality, natural kinds, the a priori, intuition, potentiality

Ontological Solutions to the Problem of Induction

The idea of the uniformity of nature, as a solution to the problem of induction, has at least two contemporary versions: natural kinds and natural necessity. Then there are at least three alternative ontological ideas addressing the problem of induction. In this paper, I articulate how these ideas are used to justify the practice of inductive inference, and compare them, in terms of their applicability, to see whether each of them is preferred in addressing the problem of induction. Given the variety of contexts in which inductive inferences are made, from natural science to social science and to everyday thinking, I suggest that no singular idea is absolutely preferred, and a proper strategy is probably to welcome the plurality of ideas helpful to induction, and to take pragmatic considerations into account, in order to judge in every single case.

What Counts as a Memory? Definitions, Hypotheses, and “Kinding in Progress”

AbstractThis paper accounts for broad definitions of memory, which extend to paradigmatic memory phenomena, like episodic memory in humans, and phenomena in worms and sea snails. These definitions may seem too broad, suggesting that they extend to phenomena that don’t count as memory or illustrate that memory is not a natural kind. However, these responses fail to consider a definition as a hypothesis. As opposed to construing definitions as expressing memory’s properties, a definition as a hypothesis is the basis to test inferences about phenomena. A definition as a hypothesis is valuable when the “kinding” of phenomena is ongoing.

Wie viele Arten von Möglichkeit gibt es? Ein Kommentar zu Barbara Vetters "Möglichkeit ohne mögliche Welten"

One implication of Vetter's theory of modality is that necessity and possibility are regarded as unitary natural kinds. In this paper, I argue that from the perspective of the philosophy of causation, there are good reasons to distinguish between different kinds of necessity: causal necessity, which is nomologically necessary, and non-causal necessity, which is metaphysically necessary. One challenge for Vetter's approach is to explain this distinction. Keywords: nomological necessity, metaphysical necessity, causation, metaphysical dependence, natural kinds

There is no such thing as culture-free intelligence.

Cognitive scientists and psychometricians are unaccustomed to thinking about culture, often treating their measures - memory, vocabulary, intelligence - as natural kinds. Relying on these measures, behavioral geneticists likewise seem to not wonder about their origin and cultural provenance. I argue that complex human traits - the sort we are most interested in measuring - are cultural products. We can measure them and their heritability, but to conclude that what we have measured is unbound to a time and place is hubris.

Perceptual Content, Phenomenal Contrasts, and Externalism

According to Sparse views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is exhausted by the experiential presentation of ‘low-level’ properties such as (in the case of vision) shapes, colors, and textures Whereas, according to Rich views of perceptual content, the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can also sometimes involve experiencing ‘high-level’ properties such as natural kinds, artefactual kinds, causal relations, linguistic meanings, and moral properties. An important dialectical tool in the debate between Rich and Sparse theorists is the so-called ‘method of phenomenal contrast’. I explore how this method of phenomenal contrast interacts with the sort of content-externalism made familiar by Putnam. I show that the possibility of Twin Earth style cases places important restrictions on the range of properties that the method of phenomenal contrast could plausibly apply to. Moreover, these restrictions would apply to some paradigmatically low-level properties as well as to some of the frequently advanced high-level properties. I also draw some general lessons about the different ways one might conceive of the relation between phenomenal character and representational content.

Tracking the World Down

The background of this paper is what I call “pragmatic inferentialism,” a view that I attribute to Robert Brandom. Here, I develop Brandom’s view and argue (i) that it is a kind of subject naturalism, in Price’s sense, and (ii) that the charge of idealism sometimes addressed against it is unwarranted. Regarding (i), I show that pragmatic inferentialism finds support from evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Regarding (ii), I present what I call “level 0 expressivism,” which I take to be the semantic counterpart of some aspects of evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Besides, I resort to Brandom’s defense of Hegel’s conceptual realism. The conclusion of the paper is a vindication of objective truth in the inferentialist framework.