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78 found
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  1. Gender First.Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - manuscript
    Let the label binary category terms refer to natural language expressions like ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘female’, and ‘male’. Focusing on ‘woman’ and ‘female’, I develop a novel, empirically supported theory of the meanings of English binary category terms. Given plausible assumptions about the metaphysics of sex and gender, this gender-first theory predicts that the sentence ‘Trans women are women’ expresses a truth in all contexts and the sentence ‘Women are adult human females’ expresses a truth in most ordinary contexts — thus (...)
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  2. (1 other version)Normative generics and social kind terms.Samia Hesni - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Generic statements are commonly expressed using the bare plural – ‘tigers are striped’ – or the indefinite singular – ‘a tiger is striped’. Notoriously, some generics can be expressed using the bare plural locution, but not the indefinite singular; bare plural generics and indefinite singular generics pattern differently. I explore this phenomenon as it applies to normative generic statements: expressions like boys don’t cry, women are kind and nurturing, children are seen and not heard – that convey something over and (...)
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  3. Generic Excluded Middle.James Ravi Kirkpatrick - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    There is a standard quantificational view of generic sentences according to which they have a tripartite logical form involving a phonologically null generic operator called 'Gen'. Recently, a number of theorists have questioned the standard view and revived a competing proposal according to which generics involve the predication of properties to kinds. This paper offers a novel argument against the kind-predication approach on the basis of the invalidity of Generic Excluded Middle, a principle according to which any sentence of the (...)
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  4. Proceedings of the Poster Session of the 29th Annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29).Hiroki Nomoto - forthcoming - In Proceedings of the Poster Session of the 29th Annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 29).
    Dayal's (2004) theory of kind terms accounts for the definiteness and number marking patterns in kind terms in many languages. Brazilian Portuguese has been claimed to be a counter-example to her theory as it seems to allow bare ``singular'' kind terms, which are predicted to be impossible according to her theory. However, the empirical status of the relevant data has not been clear so far. This paper presents a new data point from Singlish and confirms the existence of bare ``singular'' (...)
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  5. Natural Kind Semantics for a Classical Essentialist Theory of Kinds.Javier Belastegui - 2024 - Review of Symbolic Logic 17 (2).
    The aim of this paper is to provide a complete Natural Kind Semantics for an Essentialist Theory of Kinds. The theory is formulated in two-sorted first order monadic modal logic with identity. The natural kind semantics is based on Rudolf Willes Theory of Concept Lattices. The semantics is then used to explain several consequences of the theory, including results about the specificity (species–genus) relations between kinds, the definitions of kinds in terms of genera and specific differences and the existence of (...)
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  6. Two sorts of biological kind terms: The cases of ‘rice’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’.Michael Devitt & Brian Porter - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):479-505.
    Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal-historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different-idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the proposed theories. The present paper tests hypotheses that the term ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’ is simply causal-historical but the term ‘rice’ is hybrid. (...)
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  7. Defending the pure causal-historical theory of reference fixing for natural kind terms.Jaakko Tapio Reinikainen - 2024 - Synthese 203 (131):1-15.
    According to the causal-historical theory of reference, natural kind terms refer in virtue of complicated causal relations the speakers have to their environment. A common objection to the theory is that purely causal relations are insufficient to fix reference in a determinate fashion. The so-called hybrid view holds that what is also needed for successful fixing are true descriptions associated in the mind of the speaker with the referent. The main claim of this paper is that the objection fails: reference (...)
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  8. Are Natural Kind Terms Ambiguous?Jussi Haukioja, Jeske Toorman, Giosuè Baggio & Jussi Jylkkä - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (9):e13335.
    Recent experimental studies have claimed to find evidence for the view that natural kind terms such as “water” are ambiguous: that they have two extensions, one determined by superficial properties, the other by underlying essence. In an online experiment, we presented to 600 participants scenarios describing discoveries of novel samples that differ in deep structure from samples of a familiar kind but are superficially identical, such as a water-like substance that is not composed of H2O. We used three different types (...)
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  9. Reference to singular kinds in Germanic and Romance.Samuel Jambrović - 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
    The need for the definite article to express a singular kind ("the cat") in the Germanic languages is predicted by Borer's (2005) structural approach to the mass-count distinction. Chierchia's (1998) "down" operator can apply to nPs to derive mass kinds ("rice") and to DivPs to derive plural kinds ("cats"), but there is no determinerless structure that exclusively denotes properties of atomic individuals to which this same operator can apply to derive singular kinds. The only alternative is the process that Chierchia (...)
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  10. Against Arguments From Diagnostic Reasoning.Jeske Toorman - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (11):e13376.
    Recent work in cognitive psychology and experimental semantics indicates that people do not categorize natural kinds solely by virtue of their purported scientific essence. Two attempts have been made to explain away the data by appealing to the idea that participants in these studies are reasoning diagnostically. I will argue that an appeal to diagnostic reasoning will likely not help to explain away the data.
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  11. Kind terms and semantic uniformity.Andrea Bianchi - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (1):7-17.
    Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on (...)
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  12. Roads to anti-descriptivism (about reference fixing): replies to Soames, Raatikainen, and Devitt.Mario Gómez-Torrente - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):1005-1017.
    I reply to comments and criticism of my book Roads to Reference by Scott Soames (on the referents of ordinary substance terms and the conventions governing reference fixing for demonstratives, proper names, and color adjectives), Panu Raatikainen (on the exact scope of my critique of descriptivism and on the relation between referential indeterminacy and ‘‘partial reference’’), and Michael Devitt (on the role of referential intentions and anti-descriptivism in the metasemantics of demonstratives).
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  13. General-term rigidity is meaning constancy.Fredrik Haraldsen - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):41-49.
    It is often thought that some general terms or kind terms, in particular natural kind terms, are rigid designators, and that a properly extended notion of singular-term rigidity can help explain the behaviour of such general terms. In this article, I argue that the only legitimate notion of general-term rigidity is a trivial one and identify some crucial asymmetries between a posteriori necessary truths involving names and a posteriori necessary truths involving general terms. If we pay attention to these asymmetries, (...)
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  14. Teaching & Learning Guide for: “On the Semantics of Artifactual Kind Terms”.Irene Olivero & Massimiliano Carrara - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (9):e12869.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 9, September 2022.
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  15. Bolzano's externalist semantics of natural kind terms.Sajed Tayebi - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (4):1533-1546.
    Through a detailed explication of Bernard Bolzano's semantics of natural kind terms, I elucidate why and to what extent he should be recognized as a remarkable anticipator of semantic externalism. Bolzano deals with kind terms in a brief sub-section of the first volume of his Theory of Science. He divides such terms into two sub-categories, roughly corresponding to organic and inorganic kinds. It is Bolzano's account of inorganic kind terms, such as ‘gold’, that confers on him the status of an (...)
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  16. (1 other version)Natural kind terms.Luis Fernández Moreno - 2021 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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  17. (1 other version)Natural kind terms.Luis Fernández Moreno - 2021 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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  18. On the semantics of artifactual kind terms.Irene Olivero & Massimiliano Carrara - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (11):e12778.
    What kind of reference (if any) do terms such as “pencil,” “chair,” “television,” and so on have? On the matter, a de-bate between directly referential theorists and descriptiv-ist theorists is open. It is largely acknowledged that natural kind terms (such as “water,” “gold,” “tiger,” etc.) are directly referential expressions (cf. Putnam,1975). That is, they are expressions whose reference is determined by their refer-ents' nature, independent of whether we know or will ever know what this nature is. However, it does not (...)
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  19. Causal Structures in Language and Thought.Eleonore Neufeld - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    This dissertation defends the view that concepts encode causal information and, for the first time, applies this view to a range of topics in the philosophy of language and social philosophy. In my first chapter (“Cognitive Essentialism and the Structure of Concepts”), I survey the current empirical and theoretical literature on causal-essentialist theories of concepts. In my second chapter (“Meaning Externalism and Causal Model Theory”), I propose an account of natural kind concepts according to which they encode statistical information of (...)
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  20. Roads to Reference: An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language.Mario Gomez-Torrente - 2019 - Oxford, Reino Unido: Oxford University Press.
    How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, (...)
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  21. Natural Name Theory and Linguistic Kinds.J. T. M. Miller - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (9):494-508.
    The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...)
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  22. Situations, alternatives, and the semantics of ‘cases’.Friederike Moltmann - 2019 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (1):1-41.
    This paper argues that NPs with case as head noun stand for situations in their role as truthmakers within a sentential or epistemic case space. The paper develops a unified semantic analysis of case-constructions of the various sorts within a truthmaker-based version of alternative semantics.
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  23. An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs.Eleonore Neufeld - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of (...)
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  24. A dilemma about kinds and kind terms.T. Parent - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):2987-3006.
    'The kind Lion' denotes a kind. Yet many generics are thought to denote kinds also, like the subject-terms in 'The lion has a mane', 'Dinosaurs are extinct', and 'The potato was cultivated in Ireland by the end of the 17th century.' This view may be adequate for the linguist's overall purposes--however, if we limit our attention to the theory of reference, it seems unworkable. The problem is that what is often predicated of kinds is not what is predicated of the (...)
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  25. Water has a microstructural essence after all.Genoveva Martí & Carl Hoefer - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):1-15.
    In recent years attacks on the Kripke-Putnam approach to natural kinds and natural kind terms have proliferated. In a recent paper, Häggqvist and Wikforss (The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1–23, 2017) attack the once-dominant essentialist account of natural kinds. Häggqvist & Wikforss also suggest that it is time to return to some sort of cluster-based descriptivist semantics for natural kind terms, thus targeting both the metaphysical and semantic tenets that underpin the Kripke-Putnam approach. In our paper we (...)
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  26. Natural Kind Terms.Kim Sterelny - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (2):110-125.
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  27. Kant and Natural Kind Terms.Luca Forgione - 2016 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 31 (1):55-72.
    As is well known, the linguistic/philosophical reflection on natural kind terms has undergone a remarkable development in the early seventies with Putnam and Kripke’s essentialist approaches, touching upon different aspects of Kan’s slant. Preliminarily, however, it might be useful to review some of the theoretical stages in Locke and Leibniz’s approaches on natural kind terms in the light of contemporary reflections, to eventually pinpoint Kant’s contribution and see how some commentators have placed it within the theory of direct reference. Starting (...)
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  28. General terms, hybrid theories and ambiguitiy. A discussion of some experimental results.Genoveva Marti - 2015 - In Jussi Haukioja (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 157-172.
    I examine two sets of experimental results about the semantics of general terms, by Genone and Lombrozo (2012) and by Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon (forthcoming) that allegedly reveal significant variations in semantic intuitions as regards the correct application of general terms. The two sets of authors propose two entirely different semantic treatments: Genone and Lombrozo espouse a hybrid semantics whereas Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon are inclined towards an appeal to ambiguity. I cast some doubts on the coherence of a hybrid (...)
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  29. Essay review: Epistemic categories and causal kinds. [REVIEW]P. D. Magnus - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48:263-266.
    Within philosophy of science, debates about realism often turn on whether posited entities exist or whether scientific claims are true. Natural kinds tend to be investigated by philosophers of language or metaphysicians, for whom semantic or ontological considerations can overshadow scientific ones. Since science crucially involves dividing the world up into categories of things, however, issues concerning classification ought to be central for philosophy of science. Muhammad Ali Khalidi's book fills that gap, and I commend it to readers with an (...)
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  30. Empty natural kind terms and dry earth.Corine Besson - 2012 - Erkenntnis 76 (3):403-425.
    This paper considers the problem of assigning meanings to empty natural kind terms. It does so in the context of the Twin-Earth externalist-internalist debate about whether the meanings of natural kind terms are individuated by the external physical environment of the speakers using these terms. The paper clarifies and outlines the different ways in which meanings could be assigned to empty natural kind terms. And it argues that externalists do not have the semantic resources to assign them meanings. The paper (...)
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  31. Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language.Friederike Moltmann - 2012 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This book pursues the question of how and whether natural language allows for reference to abstract objects in a fully systematic way. By making full use of contemporary linguistic semantics, it presents a much greater range of linguistic generalizations than has previously been taken into consideration in philosophical discussions, and it argues for an ontological picture is very different from that generally taken for granted by philosophers and semanticists alike. Reference to abstract objects such as properties, numbers, propositions, and degrees (...)
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  32. Rigid Designation and Natural Kind Terms, Pittsburgh Style.Michael P. Wolf - 2012 - Normative Functionalism and the Pittsburgh School.
    This paper addresses recent literature on rigid designation and natural kind terms that draws on the inferentialist approaches of Sellars and Brandom, among others. Much of the orthodox literature on rigidity may be seen as appealing, more or less explicitly, to a semantic form of “the given” in Sellars’s terms. However, the important insights of that literature may be reconstructed and articulated in terms more congenial to the Pittsburgh school of normative functionalism.
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  33. 'Chocolate' and other kind terms: Implications for semantic externalism.Mark Greene - 2011 - Philosophical Quarterly 61 (243):270-292.
    How do people manage to refer to chocolate, despite knowing so little about it? Traditional semantic externalism gives a two-part answer, a negative claim that meanings are not determined inside speakers' heads, and a positive claim that meanings are fixed by external factors. This gets the semantics of ‘chocolate’ half right: the negative claim is correct, but the positive claim is not. There is nothing special about ‘chocolate’, and scientifically respectable natural-kind terms also fail to live up to the positive (...)
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  34. General terms, rigidity and the trivialization problem.Genoveva Martí & José Martínez-Fernández - 2011 - Synthese 181 (2):277 - 293.
    We defend the view that defines the rigidity of general terms as sameness of designated universal across possible worlds from the objection that such a characterization is incapable of distinguishing rigid from non-rigid readings of general terms and, thus, that it trivializes the notion of rigidity. We also argue that previous attempts to offer a solution to the trivialization problem do no succeed.
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  35. Rigidity, natural kind terms and metasemantics.Corine Besson - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 25--44.
    A paradigmatic case of rigidity for singular terms is that of proper names. And it would seem that a paradigmatic case of rigidity for general terms is that of natural kind terms. However, many philosophers think that rigidity cannot be extended from singular terms to general terms. The reason for this is that rigidity appears to become trivial when such terms are considered: natural kind terms come out as rigid, but so do all other general terms, and in particular all (...)
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  36. General terms as designators : a defence of the view.Genoveva Martí & José Martínez-Fernández - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 46--63.
    We argue that the view that kind terms designate universals does not fall prey to the trivialization problem. We also argue that the view can respond to other challenges, specifically, the claims that an adequate notion of rigidity for kind terms must: (a) classify natural kind terms as rigid and classify many other general terms as non-rigid and (b) account for the necessity of true theoretical identifications involving rigid terms.
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  37. The commonalities between proper names and natural kind terms : a Fregean perspective.Harold Noonan - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 84-103.
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  38. (1 other version)Are natural kind terms special?Åsa Wikforss - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge.
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  39. (1 other version)Are natural kind terms special?Åsa Wikforss - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge.
    It is commonly assumed that natural kind terms constitute a distinct semantic category. This idea emerged during the 1970's following Kripke's and Putnam's well-known remarks on natural kind terms. The idea has stayed with us, although it is now recognized that the issues are considerably more complex than initially thought. Thus, it has become clear that much of Kripke's and Putnam's discussions were based on rather simplified views of natural kinds. It also turns out that the semantic issues are less (...)
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  40. Unlikely bedfellows? Putnam and Hegel on natural kind terms.Katharina Dulckeit - 2009 - In Angelica Nuzzo (ed.), Hegel and the Analytic Tradition. Continuum.
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  41. Rigid Kind Terms.Jussi Haukioja - 2008 - Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 39:55-61.
    Kripke argued, famously, that proper names are rigid designators. It is often assumed that some kind terms (most prominently natural kind terms) are rigid designators as well. This is thought to have significant theoretical consequences, such as the necessity of certain a posteriori identities involving natural kind terms. However, there is no agreement on what it is for a kind term to be rigid. In this paper I will first take a detailed look at the most common view: that rigid (...)
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  42. Natural kinds and natural kind terms.Kathrin Koslicki - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (4):789-802.
    The aim of this article is to illustrate how a belief in the existence of kinds may be justified for the particular case of natural kinds: particularly noteworthy in this respect is the weight borne by scientific natural kinds (e.g., physical, chemical, and biological kinds) in (i) inductive arguments; (ii) the laws of nature; and (iii) causal explanations. It is argued that biological taxa are properly viewed as kinds as well, despite the fact that they have been by some alleged (...)
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  43. There are Kinds and Kinds of Kinds: Ben-Yami on the Semantics of Kind Terms.G. Contessa - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (2):217-248.
    Hanoch Ben-Yami has argued that the theory of the semantics of natural kind terms proposed by Kripke and Putnam is false and has proposed an allegedly novel account of the semantics of kind terms. In this article, I critically examine Ben-Yami’s arguments. I will argue that Ben-Yami’s objections do not show that Kripke and Putnam’s theory is false, but at most that the specific versions of it held by Kripke and Putnam have some weaknesses. Moreover, I will argue that Ben-Yami’s (...)
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  44. Externalism and a Posteriori Semantics.Sören Häggqvist & Åsa Wikforss - 2007 - Erkenntnis 67 (3):373 - 386.
    It is widely held that the meaning of certain types of terms, such as natural kind terms, is individuated externalistically, in terms of the individual's external environment. Recently a more radical thesis has emerged, a thesis we dub 'a posteriori semantics.' The suggestion is that not only does a term's meaning depend on the external environment, but so does its semantics. One motivation for this is the aim to account for cases where a putative natural kind term fails to pick (...)
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  45. General Terms and Non-Trivial Rigid Designation.Genoveva Marti & José Martínez-Fernández - 2007 - In Concha Martínez, José L. Falguera & José M. Sagüillo (eds.), Current topics in logic and analytic philosophy =. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. pp. 103-116.
    we explore the view that defines rigidity of general terms as sameness of designation across possible worlds. On this view, a general term is rigid just in case it designates the same universal (species, substance or property) in every possible world. This view has been proposed most notably by Bernard Linsky, Nathan Salmon and more recently by Joseph LaPorte, and it has been criticised by several philosophers, including Stephen Schwartz and Scott Soames.
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  46. On rigidity, direct reference and natural kind terms.Luis Fernández Moreno - 2007 - In María José Frápolli (ed.), Saying, meaning and referring: essays on François Recanati's philosophy of language. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
  47. Temporal externalism, natural kind terms, and scientifically ignorant communities.John M. Collins - 2006 - Philosophical Papers 35 (1):55-68.
    Temporal externalism (TE) is the thesis (defended by Jackman (1999)) that the contents of some of an individual’s thoughts and utterances at time t may be determined by linguistic developments subsequent to t. TE has received little discussion so far, Brown 2000 and Stoneham 2002 being exceptions. I defend TE by arguing that it solves several related problems concerning the extension of natural kind terms in scientifically ignorant communities. Gary Ebbs (2000) argues that no theory can reconcile our ordinary, practical (...)
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  48. An anti-individualistic semantics for 'empty' natural kind terms.Sanford Goldberg - 2006 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 70 (1):147-168.
    Several authors (Boghossian 1998; Segal 2000) allege that 'empty' would-be natural kind terms are a problem for anti-individualistic semantics. In this paper I rebut the charge by providing an anti-individualistic semantics for such terms.
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  49. Conceptual stability and the meaning of natural kind terms.David Braddon-Mitchell - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (4):859-868.
  50. Names and natural kind terms.David Braun - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 490--515.
    Names and natural kind terms have long been a major focus of debates about meaning and reference. This article discusses some of the theories and arguments that have appeared in those debates. It is remarkably difficult to say what names are without making controversial theoretical assumptions. This article does not attempt to do so here. It instead relies on paradigm examples that nearly all theorists would agree are proper names, for instance, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘London’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Pegasus’. All of (...)
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