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Natural kinds

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-N099-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-N099-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/natural-kinds/v-1

1. The notion of natural kinds

Objects belonging to a natural kind form a group of objects which have some theoretically important property, or properties, in common. Standard examples of natural kinds include biological species such as rabbits, oaks and whales, chemical elements and compounds such as oxygen, carbon and aluminium, and stuffs such as salt, wool and heat. An object’s membership of a given natural kind bears upon how that object will behave, the properties it can or cannot acquire, and the types of interaction in which it can figure. Natural kinds thereby provide a scheme of classification for science to chart (see Taxonomy). Scientists can use such a system to predict, explain and (perhaps) control the behaviour of those objects. Knowledge of natural kinds can also provide a basis for inductive and counterfactual scientific reasoning: knowledge about how past members of a natural kind behaved may warrant beliefs about how present or future members of that kind will behave, as well as how hypothetical members of that kind would behave.

Closely related is the question regarding which predicates are ‘projectible’: the question of which predicates are admissible in inductive reasoning. Predicates such as ‘is a rabbit’ and ‘is an oak’ are admissible, but not every predicate is. The predicate ‘is a roak’, which is hereby defined as being true of an object if and only if it is a rabbit or an oak, seems inadmissible. The notion of a natural kind may help in explicating this distinction between projectible and non-projectible predicates (see Goodman, N. §3).

Again, a theory’s terms are apparently open to deviant interpretations. A theory containing (say) the predicate ‘is a rabbit’ is standardly interpreted as meaning rabbit, but this predicate can be deviantly interpreted as meaning (say) rabbit or oak. To meet this problem, we might invoke the principle that among meaning-assignments we should prefer those in which the assigned meaning concerns natural kinds, rather than non-natural ones.

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Citing this article:
Daly, Chris. The notion of natural kinds. Natural kinds, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N099-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/natural-kinds/v-1/sections/the-notion-of-natural-kinds.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.

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