Is Naturalness Natural?

American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4):381-396 (2015)
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Abstract

The perfectly natural properties and relations are special—they are all and only those that "carve nature at its joints." They act as reference magnets, form a minimal supervenience base, figure in fundamental physics and in the laws of nature, and never divide duplicates within or between worlds. If the perfectly natural properties are the (metaphysically) important ones, we should expect being a perfectly natural property to itself be one of the (perfectly) natural properties. This paper argues that being a perfectly natural property is not a very natural property, and examines the consequences.

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Author's Profile

Naomi Thompson
University of Bristol

Citations of this work

Fundamentality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Necessity of Naturalness.Joshua D. K. Brown & Nathan Wildman - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):1017-1025.
Ideology in a Desert Landscape.Alessandro Torza - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):383-406.
Is Building Built?Naomi Thompson - 2019 - Analysis 79 (2):315-327.

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References found in this work

Writing the Book of the World.Theodore Sider - 2011 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
On the Plurality of Worlds.David K. Lewis - 1986 - Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.
New work for a theory of universals.David K. Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.
On the Plurality of Worlds.David Lewis - 1986 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 178 (3):388-390.
Wittgenstein on rules and private language.Saul A. Kripke - 1982 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 173 (4):496-499.

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