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How Science and Semantics Settle the Issue of Natural Kind Essentialism

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Abstract

Standard arguments for essentialism with respect to natural kinds such as gold, star, water or tiger enlist essentialist principles or essentialist intuitions. I argue that we need neither. All it takes to establish essentialism for the kinds in question are insights from science and semantics. Semantics establishes that natural kind predicates such as “is gold” or “is a star” are paradigm terms whose application conditions are relationally determined, object involving, and actuality dependent. Science assures us that a posteriori hypotheses such as “∀x(x is gold ↔ x is Au)” are deeply explanatory, as well as true. Taken together, these results establish essentialism for kinds such as gold, star, water or tiger. I consider this a deflationary result. When it comes to natural kind essentialism, there is no need for substantial metaphysics, be it essentialist or otherwise.

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Notes

  1. With Soames (2002, p. 255ff), I accept biconditionals like this as theoretical identifications. See Kripke (1980, p. 116, 138).

  2. Strictly speaking, paradigm terms form a meta-semantic category. See Nimtz (2018), esp. §3. Nothing hinges on this here. So I simplify this to “semantics” throughout.

  3. Features that are usually considered as distinctive of natural kind terms are commonly shared by paradigm terms in general. See Nimtz (2017) for details.

  4. I understand an intension to be a function from worlds to extensions.

  5. See e.g. Beebee and Sabbarton-Leary (2010), Bird and Tobin (2017), Roca-Royes (2011), Robertson and Atkins (2016), Ereshefsky (2010), Mackie (2006). More narrow versions build further requirements into the concept—“traditional essentialism” (Ereshefsky 2010, p. 675, Fn.1) requires essential properties to be intrinsic, and “scientific essentialism” (Slater and Borghini 2011, p. 14) requires essential properties to be dispositional. These are of no concern to us.

  6. I abbreviate this to “is an lsf object”. See Angelo (2006) and Schulz (2007).

  7. “pt” abbreviates a proper specification of the relevant clade, which LaPorte describes as “the lineage descending from population P and terminating in speciation or extinction” (2004, p. 61). See Davis et al. (2010) for details.

  8. See McLeod (2005, p. 236, Fn.4) for further references.

  9. I ignore subsequent changes in the meter convention.

  10. I assume throughout that R is an equivalence relation. This is a simplification. A paradigm term might well enlist a relation such as, say, has double the length as.

  11. That a bears the equivalence relation R to b trivially guarantees that a and b share the property of bearing R to a. I do not accept such trivializing instances as realizers for R. – Maybe you think that R holds because its relata share a determinate property. I merely commit to the iff-claim made in REL.

  12. As Salmon (2005, p. 166) reports, Donnellan also stresses the “doubly exotic” nature of this venture.

  13. I class two-dimensionalists such as Jackson (1998, pp. 46–52) as upholding a Kripke-Putnam view. So do Häggqvist and Wikforss (2018).

  14. See Nimtz (2017, pp. 3–5) for a closer look at Putnam and Kripke. See Koslicki (2008, p. 797) for a summary of the Putnam-Kripke view that portrays natural kind terms as paradigm terms in my sense.

  15. See Nimtz (2017, pp. 5–7) and Nimtz (2018, §3), where I use paradigm term semantics to account for additional characteristics of natural kind terms.

  16. I generally use “paradigmatic F” in this sense.

  17. The explanatory range required varies with the scientific context. It may spell out as almost all, a weighted majority of, or simply a sufficient selection from.

  18. Let us agree that pivotal explanatory properties foremost aim to explain why paradigmatic (rather than all) instances exhibit those characteristics the respective science (rather than other sciences, or common sense) deem crucial. Then (3*) and (4*) become more tractable. Assume that paradigmatic samples of water are puddle-sized portions under normal environmental conditions. The key chemical characteristics of such samples under such conditions can be traced back to the traits of H2O-molecules and the (notably: bonding) behavior they show when in close proximity. This makes being H2O the pivotal explanatory property for water, even though non-paradigmatic portions conspicuously lack many of these explananda. See for discussion Hendry (2006), Needham (2011), Hendry (2010), Schulte (2018). See Stanford and Kitcher (2000, p. 112f) for basically the same argument. As for “is a tiger”, within current biology, there is no consensus on which properties of paradigmatic tigers a pivotal explanatory property needs to account for. If we assume this settled, say in favor of a cladistics approach aiming to account for evolutionary dynamics, arguing that (4*) is a deeply explanatory hypothesis becomes much easier.

  19. Compare Nimtz (2017, pp. 10–13), where I use a similar argument to a different end.

  20. See Burgess (2014) for details and clarifications.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tim Henning, Peter Schulte, Steven Kindley, Fabian Hundertmark, Martin Korth and audiences at Bielefeld, Tampere and Edinburgh for discussions of earlier versions of this paper. I am particularly indebted to two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis whose comments allowed me to substantially improve the argument.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Bielefeld University, P.O. 100131, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Christian Nimtz

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Nimtz, C. How Science and Semantics Settle the Issue of Natural Kind Essentialism. Erkenn 86, 149–170 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0098-1

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