Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: From Planets to Mallards (New Directions in the Philosophy of Science)

There are certainly some scientific categories which are merely conveniences introduced to organize complicated data, but others correspond to genuine features of the world. These are indispensable for successful science in some domain; in short, they are natural kinds. This book gives a general account of what it is to be a natural kind. It untangles philosophical puzzles surrounding natural kinds. Natural kinds can be practical, and we can identify them without pretending to know the fundamental structure of reality. The account is then put to work to illuminate specific examples, such as the category planet and the fate of Pluto, species like the common mallard and the species category itself, cognition and distributed cognition, animal signals and the threats they signify, and even baked goods. Cover 1 Contents 6 List of Illustrations 9 Acknowledgments 10 Series Editor鈥檚 Foreword 12 Introduction 14 1 How to Think about Natural Kinds 17 A. Why history is no help 18 B. Some criteria considered 20 B.1 The induction assumption 21 B.2 The essence assumption 31 B.3 The science assumption 32 B.4 The law assumption 34 B.5 Artifacts and artificial kinds 36 B.6 The sharpness assumption 39 B.7 Starting with language 42 B.8 The intrinsic feature assumption 45 B.9 The hierarchy assumption 50 B.10 The scarcity assumption 51 B.11 The implicit simpliciter assumption 52 C. Keeping score 58 2 A Modest Definition 60 A. First formulation 60 B. More or less natural kinds 62 B.1 Lessons from underdetermination 63 B.2 The lessons applied 65 C. Induction redux 68 D. Natural kinds for settled science 70 D.1 Example: the domain of chemistry 70 D.2 Fungible kinds 74 3 Natural Kinds Put to Work 81 A. Eight planets, great planets 81 A.1 Numerology and asteroids 83 A.2 Enter Pluto 84 A.3 The constraints of astronomy 86 A.4 Natural kinds and the fate of Pluto 91 B. The abundance of living things 96 B.1 Particular species (buzz, buzz) 98 B.2 The species category 100 B.3 How species are and are not natural kinds 107 C. Thinking outside the box 109 C.1 Tasks and processes 109 C.2 Distributed cognition 110 C.3 What the natural kind is not 114 D. Further examples 115 4 Practical and Impractical Ontology 116 A. An unreasonable dichotomy 116 A.1 Natural kinds and bicameral legislation 118 A.2 Amphibolic pragmatism 122 A.3 The pragmatists' hope of convergence 126 A.4 Engaging the world 128 A.5 The practical as leverage on the real 130 B. Deep metaphysics 132 B.1 Bad arguments for realism 133 B.2 Realism and metaphysical depth 136 5 The Menace of Triviality 139 A. Cheap similarity 140 B. Project-relative kinds 142 B.1 Promiscuous realism 143 B.2 Cooking up natural kinds 146 C. Agent-relative kinds 149 C.1 Meerkat threats and alarms 150 C.2 Unicorns and fictobiology 153 C.3 Constellations 155 D. Coda on promiscuity 158 6 Causal Processes and Property Clusters 160 A. Species as the specimen of an HPC 162 A.1 Worries about polymorphism 164 A.2 Getting over similarity fetishism 169 A.3 Natural kinds and systematic explanation 173 B. Species and token histories 178 B.1 The tigers of Mars 179 B.2 Hybrids and separate origin 181 C. RE: ducks, the species problem redux 185 D. Historical individuals 188 D.1 Sets and sums, a metaphysical non sequitur 189 D.2 Metaphysical puzzles about change 194 D.3 Individualism and HPCs 195 E. HPC thinking beyond token causes 196 E.1 The waters of Mars 197 E.2 The Unity Problem 201 F. Coda on HPCs 203 7 Conclusion 205 Bibliography 208 Index 220 Some scientific categories seem to correspond to genuine features of the world and are indispensable for successful science in some domain; in short, they are natural kinds. This book gives a general account of what it is to be a natural kind and puts the account to work illuminating numerous specific examples.