Abstract
It has recently been argued that the concept of natural kinds should be eliminated because it does not play a productive theoretical role and even harms philosophical research on scientific classification. We argue that this justification for eliminativism fails because the notion of ‘natural kinds’ plays another epistemic role in philosophical research, namely, it enables fruitful investigation into non-arbitrary classification. It does this in two ways: first, by providing a fruitful investigative entry into scientific classification; and second—as is supported by bibliometric evidence—by tying together a research community devoted to non-arbitrary classification. The question of eliminativism then requires weighing off the benefits of retaining the concept against its harms. We argue that the progressive state of philosophical work on natural kinds tips this balance in favour of retaining the concept.
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Notes
See Bursten (2018, pp. 4–9) for a more extensive defence of this claim.
We want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to us.
There are many more examples if we consider scientific products beyond concepts. Most prominently, models too have been argued to sometimes play a heuristic rather than a theoretical role (e.g. Frigg and Hunter 2010).
For example, 53% of 185,681 WoS-indexed papers published between 2001 and 2017 in the WoS subject category ‘Philosophy’ are articles, and 38% of them are book reviews.
For example, the average citation rate of the 8056 articles published in 2017 under the WoS subject category ‘Philosophy’ is 0.97, according to a search on 22 August, 2019.
In other fields of research, social networks are often investigated by means of collaborations between scientists. However, as collaboration practices in philosophy are very different from those in the fields of science for which these methods were developed, we did not use them here.
See supplementary material, ‘term 1’ for the search term.
BibExcel is a commonly-used tool-box for analysing bibliographic data, available at https://homepage.univie.ac.at/juan.gorraiz/bibexcel/.
VOSviewer is a software tool for creating maps based on network data, developed by the CWTS group at Leiden University. https://www.vosviewer.com/.
See supplementary material, ‘term 2’ for the search term.
See supplementary material, ‘term 3’ for the search term. To make sure that the BC-map is not determined by spurious results (e.g. ‘disasters of the non-natural and natural kind’), we randomly checked 10% of the documents on which the map was based. As none of these were spurious, and because the clusters on the map are clearly relevant to ‘natural kinds’, it is clear that the shape of this map is not determined by spurious results.
See supplementary material, ‘term 4’ for the search term.
See supplementary material, ‘term 5’ for the search term.
‘Non-philosophical’ is defined as any WoS category except for ‘Philosophy’,’History Philosophy of Science’ and ‘Ethics’.
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Acknowledgements
We want to thank David Ludwig, Olivier Lemeire and participants of the CLPS Brown Bag Seminar in Leuven for their helpful comments on this paper. Stijn Conix gratefully acknowledges funding from the KU Leuven onderzoeksraad (Grant 3H160214) and from the Flemish Research Council (FWO; Grant 3H200026).
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The first draft of the paper was written by Stijn Conix, apart from section 6, which was written by Pei-Shan Chi. Both authors contributed to the design of the research methodology and data collection for the tests in section 6. Pei-Shan Chi performed the analysis and designed the figures. Both authors read and revised multiple drafts of the paper.
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Conix, S., Chi, PS. Against natural kind eliminativism. Synthese 198, 8999–9020 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02614-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02614-2