Abstract
I confess to a degree of nervousness about using the term “natural”. At the very least, if it does suggest one half of a dichotomy, we should reject the idea that the contrast is with things which are unnatural. This idea has moral connotations that attempt to secure legitimacy by locating specific moral principles firmly within nature itself. It provides fundamentalists of all persuasions with pseudo-arguments for condemning as unnatural particular practices that they, themselves, find abhorrent. But apart from willfully confusing what is with what ought to be, such arguments inevitably collapse on their own terms: that the practices in question do occur (obviously) suffices to show that nothing in nature prevents them. I shall return to questions of morality later, but needless to say, they will not be dealt with by appealing to any kind of natural-unnatural dichotomy. In this chapter I explore the idea that certain natural kinds of objects – including our own kind – may be associated with necessary or essential properties that are constitutive of these kinds and, moreover, that such properties play a key role in the continuing identity – hence, the very existence – of these objects.
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Notes
- 1.
There is an interesting but – perhaps fortunately – irrelevant digression here, on the subject of the nature and scope of the necessity posited here. Does it follow that laws of nature themselves are, if true, then necessarily true, and is this notion of necessity tantamount to the logician’s strong sense of necessity, or to something weaker (Wiggins 2001, p. 85)?
- 2.
See Kripke (1980). Kripke is regarded as the modern-day champion of this view of proper names, with his theory of rigid designation.
- 3.
Such reducibility would have many casualties, including the very terms which were postulated as biological natural kind terms in the first place. If all the characteristics and behavior of such biological entities as horses and cypress trees can be explained in terms of the characteristics and behavior of atoms, molecules and other non-biological entities, then there seems little point in positing horse as a natural kind since, as such, it has no real explanatory power.
- 4.
Mayr was consistently opposed to any form of Essentialism when it came to defining or specifying the meanings of species and other biological concepts, although it is arguable that his views on what constitutes essentialism were somewhat limited (Splitter 1982). One philosopher who also wrote extensively against both essentialism and the thesis that species are natural kinds is David Hull (1965, for one of many exemplary papers).
- 5.
Boyd (1999).
- 6.
“Part of what makes something a living organism, I suggest, is its capacity to coordinate and regulate its metabolic and other vital functions” (Olson 1997, p. 133).
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Splitter, L.J. (2015). Natural Kinds and Identity. In: Identity and Personhood. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-481-8_4
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