Abstract
Opinions are divided on the question whether the notion of ‘natural kinds’ plays an important role in philosophy of science. Some authors have argued that it does not, because the idea of natural kinds features only in the early stages of the development of scientific fields of work and ceases to play a role once the field becomes established. Others have argued that it does not, because natural kinds are found only on the most fundamental levels of organization, so that most scientific fields of work do not study natural kinds. Against this dim view of the importance of the notion of ‘natural kinds’ for philosophy of science, I shall argue that it roots in a particular tradition of thinking about the problem of natural kinds and that there is an alternative way of thinking about natural kinds that does not give rise to such a dim view. In so doing, I shall explore what the principal challenge is for philosophers who attempt to devise an account of natural kinds.
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Notes
- 1.
For reasons of space, I do not provide references. Examples are easy to find in the literature.
- 2.
But an important part of Ellis’s philosophical project in Scientific Essentialism (2001) is to ground the laws of nature in the natural kinds that lie at the focus of the fundamental fields of science.
- 3.
This view is strengthened by recent developments in philosophy of biology and of social science. Hacking (1995), for example, argued that the kinds used in the human sciences cannot be conceived of as natural kinds, because human beings can themselves influence the way in which they are classified. And in the last 30–40 years biologists and philosophers of biology became convinced that biological species – one of the long-standing paradigms of natural kinds – probably should not be conceived of as kinds but as concrete individuals. However, despite several decades of debate on the ontology of biological species, this issue still remains undecided and in recent years several philosophers have argued for a return to a view of species as natural kinds (for a very recent example, see Elder (2008)).
- 4.
Hacking (2007) recently presented a third argument for the uselessness of natural kind theories, namely that the history of the philosophical discussion on the topic shows that there are no philosophical questions that arise specifically with respect to natural kinds. That is, all interesting questions about natural kinds arise in a more general context and framing them using the notion of ‘natural kinds’ adds nothing (except, perhaps, confusion) to the discussion. For reasons of space, I shall not consider Hacking’s position further.
- 5.
Russell, for instance, equated the doctrine of natural kinds (which he rejects) with the postulate that variation in the universe is limited (1948: 456–462).
- 6.
Besides Hacking and (to a lesser extent) Boyd, so far no one has studied the history of philosophical work on the topic in sufficient depth. As the present paper is not a work in history of philosophy and my aim is not to trace the precise historical lines of work on the topic of natural kinds, here I take Hacking’s and Boyd’s stories at face value. My aim in this section is to make plausible that in present-day philosophy two distinct lines of thinking about natural kinds exist, whatever exactly their historical origins and interconnections might be.
- 7.
Essay, Book III, Chap. VI, §§6–11.
- 8.
Essay, Book III, Chap. VI, §§36–37.
- 9.
Phaedrus, sections 265d–266a; Statesman, section 287c.
- 10.
This view is still alive and well today; compare: “natural kinds are categories that are actually there in nature, as opposed to being impositions on nature for our own convenience” (Garvey, 2007: 127; emphasis added).
- 11.
This already suggests that epistemological issues deserve priority over metaphysical ones.
- 12.
As Boyd acknowledged, “[a]lmost all sorts of kinds and kind terms except the most clearly arbitrary have been treated as natural kinds and kind terms” (1991: 128).
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Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was funded by the German Research Council (DFG) under grants no. RE 2613/1–1 and RE 2613/1–2.
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Reydon, T.A.C. (2009). Natural Kind Theory as a Tool for Philosophers of Science. In: Suárez, M., Dorato, M., Rédei, M. (eds) EPSA Epistemology and Methodology of Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3263-8_21
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