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Taxonomy, ontology, and natural kinds

  • S.I. : Causation in Metaphysics
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Abstract

When we ask what natural kinds are, there are two different things we might have in mind. The first, which I’ll call the taxonomy question, is what distinguishes a category which is a natural kind from an arbitrary class. The second, which I’ll call the ontology question, is what manner of stuff there is that realizes the category. Many philosophers have systematically conflated the two questions. The confusion is exhibited both by essentialists and by philosophers who pose their accounts in terms of similarity. It also leads to misreading philosophers who do make the distinction. Distinguishing the questions allows for a more subtle understanding of both natural kinds and their underlying metaphysics.

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Notes

  1. Regarding deep and equity realism, see Magnus (2012, ch. 4).

  2. The phrase is used as the title of Campell et al. (2011) and was the working title of Magnus (2012).

  3.  Sider (2011) talks about ‘joint-carving’ structure as the metaphysical generalization of Lewis’ idea of natural properties. But his candidates for structure, the fundamental elements of being, are too abstruse to be of much use for philosophers of science.

  4. I discuss this example at length elsewhere Magnus (2012, ch. 2, Sect. A). The upshot is that there are at least two different natural kinds for astronomy which ‘planet’ could be used to name. One of these does include Pluto but also includes the asteroid Ceres and much else besides. The other, which retains the distinction between asteroids and planets, excludes Pluto and was the one chosen by astronomers.

  5. [Essay] citations to Locke are from the Nidditch edition Locke (1975), and references are given to book, chapter, and section.

  6. The narrative is promulgated by Ian Hacking and widely accepted. Khalidi (2013) and Schwartz (2013) are exceptions, philosophers who take their inspiration from Mill but do not endorse Hacking’s reading.

  7. The standard narrative makes two claims of continuity: First, that the present tradition of ‘natural kind’ talk began with Mill. Second, that the term of Mill’s system which corresponds to our ‘natural kind’ is ‘Kind’. Both are mistaken: Although Mill’s Kinds were called natural kinds in the late 19th-century, his conception is not the source for recent use of the term (MacLeod and Reydon 2013; Magnus 2014a). Moreover, it misrepresents his view to simply translate his term ‘Kind’ into our term ‘natural kind’ (Magnus forthcoming).

  8. Providing a detailed argument for this reading of Mill is beyond the scope of this paper, but see Magnus (forthcoming).

  9. The argument of this section follows Magnus (2014b).

  10. Taken narrowly, the property cluster might be a single list of properties which are typical for all members of the kind. Taken more broadly, the properties can be structured into a complex of related clusters. The broader construal allows polymorphic kinds to be understood as HPCs. (Magnus 2011)

  11. Slater endorsed ‘NK \(= \) SPC’ as shorthand for his account at the Paris workshop, even writing the formula on the chalkboard during his own talk.

  12. Although it might require a different counterexample, NK \(= \) SPC or NK \(= \) ICPC accounts are similarly vulnerable. The approaches of Slater and Martínez thus launch us into the familiar analytic regress of monster-barring and counterexamples.

  13. Reydon goes on to argue that HPCs should not be understood merely as collections of things that exhibit intrinsic similarity. I agree. More than crude similarity is require to make sense of polymorphic kinds (Magnus 2011). My disagreement here is with Reydon’s framing of the problem.

  14. The phrase is meant to pleasantly riff on Robert Merton’s theories of the middle range (Merton 1968). Although ‘ontology’ is not presumptively fundamental in my idiolect, some readers might find the term as problematic as ‘metaphysics’. Van Inwagen (2013) suggests that the word ‘ontology’ was itself invented to mean “the science of being as such” when the term ‘metaphysics’ started to be used more generally.

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Acknowledgments

This was originally given as a talk at The Metaphysics of Science: Causation and Natural Kinds, a workshop at the Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Paris, March 2014. Thanks to participants at the workshop for vigorous discussion, and to K. Brad Wray for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University at Albany, State University of New York Albany, New York, 12222, USA

    P. D. Magnus

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Magnus, P.D. Taxonomy, ontology, and natural kinds. Synthese 195, 1427–1439 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0785-2

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