Natural Kinds
Philosophy 63 (243):29-42 (1988)
Abstract
What is a natural kind? As we shall see, the concept of a natural kind has a long history. Many of the interesting doctrines can be detected in Aristotle, were revived by Locke and Leibniz, and have again become fashionable in recent years. Equally there has been agreement about certain paradigm examples: the kinds oak, stickleback and gold are natural kinds, and the kinds table, nation and banknote are not. Sadly agreement does not extend much further. It is impossible to discover a single consistent doctrine in the literature, and different discussions focus on different doctrines without writers or readers being aware of the fact. In this paper I shall attempt to find a defensible distinction between natural and non-natural kinds.My notes
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Citations of this work
Activities of kinding in scientific practice.Catherine Kendig - 2016 - In C. Kendig (ed.), Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice. Routledge.
Basic Racial Realism.Joshua Glasgow & Jonathan M. Woodward - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3):449--466.
No purely epistemic theory can account for the naturalness of kinds.Olivier Lemeire - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):2907-2925.