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Mind explaining to someone with only a cursory knowledge of the philosophy of natural kinds, what it contributes to this topic?
by rictic 3y ago
Mind explaining to someone with only a cursory knowledge of the philosophy of natural kinds, what it contributes to this topic?
- lukeasrodgers 3y agoVery briefly, the idea of a natural kind term is that of a term that “carves nature at its joints” (Plato’s metaphor), ie is not just a convenient way of splitting the world up into entities but one that reflects the true structure of reality. Philosophers have debated various criteria for determining what constitutes a natural kind, which I think would have added some clarity to the article. A related approach that could have added clarity (though I can’t recall whether it deals with natural kinds per se) is Hacking’s Social Construction of What? which lays out a sort of hierarchy for how socially constructed a given phenomenon is. It attempts to add rigor to our intuitions around how objective or subjective a given judgement is.