Download or read book The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds written by Helen Beebee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essentialism--roughly, the view that natural kinds have discrete essences, generating truths that are necessary but knowable only a posteriori--is an increasingly popular view in the metaphysics of science. At the same time, philosophers of language have been subjecting Kripke’s views about the existence and scope of the necessary a posteriori to rigorous analysis and criticism. Essentialists typically appeal to Kripkean semantics to motivate their radical extension of the realm of the necessary a posteriori; but they rarely attempt to provide any semantic arguments for this extension, or engage with the critical work being done by philosophers of language. This collection brings authors on both sides together in one volume, thus helping the reader to see the connections between views in philosophy of language on the one hand and the metaphysics of science on the other. The result is a book that will have a significant impact on the debate about essentialism, encouraging essentialists to engage with debates about the semantic presuppositions that underpin their position, and, encouraging philosophers of language to engage with the metaphysical presuppositions enshrined in Kripkean semantics.

Download or read book Natural Categories and Human Kinds written by Muhammad Ali Khalidi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-16 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences.

Download or read book Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice written by Catherine Kendig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume of 13 new essays aims to turn past discussions of natural kinds on their head. Instead of presenting a metaphysical view of kinds based largely on an unempirical vantage point, it pursues questions of kindedness which take the use of kinds and activities of kinding in practice as significant in the articulation of them as kinds. The book brings philosophical study of current and historical episodes and case studies from various scientific disciplines to bear on natural kinds as traditionally conceived of within metaphysics. Focusing on these practices reveals the different knowledge-producing activities of kinding and processes involved in natural kind use, generation, and discovery. Specialists in their field, the esteemed group of contributors use diverse empirically responsive approaches to explore the nature of kindhood. This groundbreaking volume presents detailed case studies that exemplify kinding in use. Newly written for this volume, each chapter engages with the activities of kinding across a variety of disciplines. Chapter topics include the nature of kinds, kindhood, kinding, and kind-making in linguistics, chemical classification, neuroscience, gene and protein classification, colour theory in applied mathematics, homology in comparative biology, sex and gender identity theory, memory research, race, extended cognition, symbolic algebra, cartography, and geographic information science. The volume seeks to open up an as-yet unexplored area within the emerging field of philosophy of science in practice, and constitutes a valuable addition to the disciplines of philosophy and history of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Download or read book Carving Nature at Its Joints written by Joseph Keim Campbell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-10-28 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflections on the metaphysics and epistemology of classification from a distinguished group of philosophers. Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato's Phaedrus: successful theories should "carve nature at its joints." But is nature really "jointed"? Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification. The contributors consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics. Carving Nature at Its Joints offers both breadth and thematic unity, providing a sampling of state-of-the-art work in contemporary analytic philosophy that will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students concerned with classification.

Download or read book Natural Kinds and Genesis written by Stewart Umphrey and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Natural Kinds and Genesis: The Classification of Material Entities, Stewart Umphrey raises and answers two questions: What is it to be a natural kind? And are there in fact any natural kinds? First, using the everyday understanding of things, he argues that natural kinds may be understood as classes or as types, and that the members or tokens of such kinds are individual continuants. A continuant is essentially a being-in-becoming, a material thing which changes and yet remains the same, in virtue of its nature or essence, as long as it exists. In the primary sense of the term, then, a natural kind is a class whose members closely resemble one another substantially, in virtue of their essences. Alternatively, it is a type whose tokens exemplify it in virtue of their essences. To answer the second question, one must make use of relevant scientific theories as well. Umphrey agrees with scientific essentialists that there are natural kinds, but he argues that most of the chemical, physical, and biological kinds posited in current theories are not natural kinds in the primary sense of the term. The natural-kinds realism he affirms is thus quite restricted: it requires the existence of enduring things which closely resemble one another in virtue of their essences, and such things exist, apparently, only if they have come into being, or emerged, in the course of symmetry-breaking events. Natural Kinds and Genesis will be of interest to philosophers of science and to those interested in the metaphysics of natural kinds and their members.

Download or read book Knowledge and Its Place in Nature written by Hilary Kornblith and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers have traditionally used conceptual analysis to investigate knowledge. Hilary Kornblith argues that this is misguided: it is not the concept of knowledge that we should be investigating, but knowledge itself, a robust natural phenomenon, suitable for scientific study. Cognitive ethologists not only attribute intentional states to non-human animals, they also speak of such animals as having knowledge; and this talk of knowledge does causal and explanatory work withintheir theories. The account of knowledge which emerges from this literature is a version of reliabilism: knowledge is reliably produced true belief.This account of knowledge is not meant merely to provide an elucidation of an important scientific category. Rather, Kornblith argues that knowledge, in this very sense, is what philosophers have been talking about all along. Rival accounts are examined in detail and it is argued that they are inadequate to the phenomenon of knowledge (even of human knowledge).One traditional objection to this sort of naturalistic approach to epistemology is that, in providing a descriptive account of the nature of important epistemic categories, it must inevitably deprive these categories of their normative force. But Kornblith argues that a proper account of epistemic normativity flows directly from the account of knowledge which is found in cognitive ethology. Knowledge may be properly understood as a real feature of the world which makes normative demands uponus.This controversial and refreshingly original book offers philosophers a new way to do epistemology.

Download or read book Essence in the Age of Evolution written by Christopher J. Austin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a novel defence of a highly contested philosophical position: biological natural kind essentialism. This theory is routinely and explicitly rejected for its purported inability to be explicated in the context of contemporary biological science, and its supposed incompatibility with the process and progress of evolution by natural selection. Christopher J. Austin challenges these objections, and in conjunction with contemporary scientific advancements within the field of evolutionary-developmental biology, the book utilises a contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of "dispositional properties", or causal powers, to provide a theory of essentialism centred on the developmental architecture of organisms and its role in the evolutionary process. By defending a novel theory of Aristotelian biological natural kind essentialism, Essence in the Age of Evolution represents the fresh and exciting union of cutting-edge philosophical insight and scientific knowledge.

Download or read book A Companion to the Philosophy of Science written by W. H. Newton-Smith and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2001-10-08 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unmatched in the quality of its world-renowned contributors, this companion serves as both a course text and a reference book across the broad spectrum of issues of concern to the philosophy of science.

Download or read book Concepts Kinds and Cognitive Development written by Frank C. Keil and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992-01-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds studies, natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development. The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve. The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data. While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Keil argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development. A Bradford Book

Download or read book Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science written by Shamik Dasgupta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science asks twelve philosophers to debate six questions that are driving contemporary work in this area of philosophy. The questions are: I. Are Boltzmann Brains Bad? II. Does Mathematical Explanation Require Mathematical Truth? III. Does Quantum Mechanics Suggest Spacetime is Nonfundamental? IV. Is Evolution Fundamental When It Comes to Defining Biological Ontology? V. Is Chance Ontologically Fundamental? VI. Are Sexes Natural Kinds? These debates explore the philosophical foundations of particular scientific disciplines, while also examining more general issues in the philosophy of science. The result is a book that’s perfect for the advanced philosophy student, building up their knowledge of the foundations of the field and engaging with its cutting-edge questions. Preliminary descriptions of each chapter, annotated lists of further readings for each controversy, and study questions for each chapter help provide clearer and richer snapshots of active controversies for all readers.

Download or read book Essays in Honor of Carl G Hempel written by N. Rescher and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eminent philosopher of science Carl G. Hempel, Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and a Past President of the American Philosophical Association, has had a long and distinguished academic career in the course of which he has been professorial mentor to some of America's most distinguished philosophers. This volume gathers together twelve original papers by Hempel's students and associates into a volume intended to do homage to Hempel on the occasion of his 65th year in 1970. The papers are grouped around the unifying topic of Hempel's own interests in logic and philosophy of science, the great majority dealing with issues on inductive logic and the theory of scientific explanatio- problems to which Hempel has devoted the bulk of his outstandingly fruitful efforts. With the approach of 'Peter' Hempel's 65th birthday, an editorial committee sprang into being by an uncannily spontaneous process to prepare to commemorate this event with an appropriate Festschrift. The editors were pleased to receive unfailingly prompt and efficient coopera tion on the part of all contributors. The responsibility of seeing the work through the press was assumed by Nicholas Rescher. The editors are grateful to all concerned for their collaboration. ALAN ROSS ANDERSON PAUL BENACERRAF ADOLF GRUNBAUM GERALD J. MASSEY NICHOLAS RESCHER RICHARD S. RUDNER TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE V PAUL OPPENHEIM: Reminiscences of Peter 1 w. v. QUINE: Natural Kinds 5 JAAKKO HINTIKKA: Inductive Independence and the Paradoxes of Confirmation 24 WESLEY c.

Download or read book What s Left of Human Nature written by Maria Kronfeldner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether.

Download or read book Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry IV written by Kenneth S. Kendler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revisions of both DSM-IV and ICD-10 have again focused the interest of the field of psychiatry and clinical psychology on the issue of nosology. This interest has been further heightened by a series of controversies associated with the development of DSM-5 including the fate of proposed revisions of the personality disorders, bereavement, and the autism spectrum. Major debate arose within the DSM process about the criteria for changing criteria, leading to the creation of first the Scientific Review Committee and then a series of other oversight committees which weighed in on the final debates on the most controversial proposed additions to DSM-5, providing important influences on the final decisions. Contained within these debates were a range of conceptual and philosophical issues. Some of these - such as the definition of mental disorder or the problems of psychiatric “epidemics” - have been with the field for a long time. Others - the concept of epistemic iteration as a framework for the introduction of nosologic change - are quite new. This book reviews issues within psychiatric nosology from clinical, historical and particularly philosophical perspectives. The book brings together a range of distinguished authors - including major psychiatric researchers, clinicians, historians and especially nosologists - including several leaders of the DSM-5 effort and the DSM Steering Committee. It also includes contributions from psychologists with a special interest in psychiatric nosology and philosophers with a wide range of orientations. The book is organized into four major sections: The first explores the nature of psychiatric illness and the way in which it is defined, including clinical and psychometric perspectives. The second section examines problems in the reification of psychiatric diagnostic criteria, the problem of psychiatric epidemics, and the nature and definition of individual symptoms. The third section explores the concept of epistemic iteration as a possible governing conceptual framework for the revision efforts for official psychiatric nosologies such as DSM and ICD and the problems of validation of psychiatric diagnoses. The book ends by exploring how we might move from the descriptive to the etiologic in psychiatric diagnoses, the nature of progress in psychiatric research, and the possible benefits of moving to a living document (or continuous improvement) model for psychiatric nosologic systems. The result is a book that captures the dynamic cross-disciplinary interactions that characterize the best work in the philosophy of psychiatry.

Download or read book Knowing the Natural Law written by Steven J. Jensen and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowing the Natural Law traces the thought of Aquinas from an understanding of human nature to a knowledge of the human good, from there to an account of ought-statements, and finally to choice, which issues in human actions. The much discussed article on the precepts of the natural law (I-II, 94, 2) provides the framework for a natural law rooted in human nature and in speculative knowledge. Practical knowledge is itself threefold: potentially practical knowledge, virtually practical knowledge, and fully practical knowledge.

Download or read book The Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds written by Marion Godman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural kinds is a widely used and pivotal concept in philosophy – the idea being that the classifications and taxonomies employed by science correspond to the real kinds in nature. Natural kinds are often opposed to the idea of kinds in the human and social sciences, which are typically seen as social constructions, characterised by changing norms and resisting scientific reduction. Yet human beings are also a subject of scientific study.Does this mean humans fall into corresponding kinds of their own? In The Epistemology and Morality of Human Kinds Marion Godman defends the idea of human kinds. She first examines the scientific use and nature of human kinds, considering the arguments of key philosophers whose work bears upon human kinds, such as Ian Hacking, John Searle, Richard Boyd and Ruth Millikan. Using the examples of gender, ethnic minorities and Buddhism she then argues that human kinds are a result of ongoing historical reproduction, chiefly due to pre-existing cultural models and social learning. Her novel argument shifts the focus away from the reductionism characteristic of research about human kinds. Instead, sheargues that they are “multiply projectable” and deserving of scientific study not in spite of, but because of their role in explaining our identity, injusticeand the emergence of group rights.

Download or read book Doing Without Concepts written by Edouard Machery and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-27 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concept fail to provide a coherent framework to organize our extensive empirical knowledge about concepts. Machery proposes that to develop such a framework, drastic conceptual changes are required.

Download or read book John Locke and Natural Philosophy written by Peter R. Anstey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Anstey presents an innovative study of John Locke's views on the method and content of natural philosophy. He argues that Locke was an advocate of the experimental philosophy: the new approach to natural philosophy championed by the scientists of the Royal Society who were opposed to speculative philosophy.