Related

Contents
152 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 152
  1. Goodman Paradox, Hume's Problem, Goodman-Kripke Paradox: Three Different Issues.Beppe Brivec - manuscript
    This paper reports (in section 1 “Introduction”) some quotes from Nelson Goodman which clarify that, contrary to a common misunderstanding, Goodman always denied that “grue” requires temporal information and “green” does not require temporal information; and, more in general, that Goodman always denied that grue-like predicates require additional information compared to what green-like predicates require. One of the quotations is the following, taken from the first page of the Foreword to chapter 8 “Induction” of the Goodman’s book “Problems and Projects”: (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Platonism, Nominalism, and Semantic Appearances.Justin Clarke-Doane - forthcoming - Logique Et Analyse.
    It is widely assumed that platonism with respect to a discourse of metaphysical interest, such as fictional or mathematical discourse, affords a better account of the semantic appearances than nominalism, other things being equal. Of course, other things may not be equal. For example, platonism is supposed to come at the cost of a plausible epistemology and ontology. But the hedged claim is often treated as a background assumption. It is motivated by the intuitively stronger one that the platonist can (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Cats are not necessarily animals.Margarida Hermida - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-20.
    Some plausibly necessary a posteriori theoretical claims include ‘water is H2O’, ‘gold is the element with atomic number 79’, and ‘cats are animals’. In this paper I challenge the necessity of the third claim. I argue that there are possible worlds in which cats exist, but are not animals. Under any of the species concepts currently accepted in biology, organisms do not belong essentially to their species. This is equally true of their ancestors. In phylogenetic systematics, monophyletic clades such as (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Classification, Kinds, Taxonomic Stability, and Conceptual Change.Jaipreet Mattu & Jacqueline Anne Sullivan - forthcoming - Aggression and Violent Behavior.
    Scientists represent their world, grouping and organizing phenomena into classes by means of concepts. Philosophers of science have historically been interested in the nature of these concepts, the criteria that inform their application and the nature of the kinds that the concepts individuate. They also have sought to understand whether and how different systems of classification are related and more recently, how investigative practices shape conceptual development and change. Our aim in this paper is to provide a critical overview of (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  5. Group Minds and Natural Kinds.Robert D. Rupert - forthcoming - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies.
    The claim is frequently made that structured collections of individuals who are themselves subjects of mental and cognitive states – such collections as courts, countries, and corporations – can be, and often are, subjects of mental or cognitive states. And, to be clear, advocates for this so-called group-minds hypothesis intend their view to be interpreted literally, not metaphorically. The existing critical literature casts substantial doubt on this view, at least on the assumption that groups are claimed to instantiate the same (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6. Kinds of Kinds: Normativity, Scope and Implementation in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Steffen Koch & Kevin Scharp (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Synthese Library.
    In this paper I distinguish three kinds of kinds: traditional philosophical kinds such as truth, knowledge, and causation; natural science kinds such as spin, charge and mass; and social kinds such as class, poverty, and marriage. The three-fold taxonomy I work with represents an idealised abstraction from the wide variety of kinds that there are and the messy phenomena that underlie them. However, the kinds I identify are discrete, and the three-fold taxonomy is useful when it comes to understanding claims (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Representational Kinds.Joulia Smortchkova & Michael Murez - forthcoming - In Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dolega & Tobias Schlicht (eds.), What are Mental Representations? New York, État de New York, États-Unis:
    Many debates in philosophy focus on whether folk or scientific psychological notions pick out cognitive natural kinds. Examples include memory, emotions and concepts. A potentially interesting type of kind is: kinds of mental representations (as opposed, for example, to kinds of psychological faculties). In this chapter we outline a proposal for a theory of representational kinds in cognitive science. We argue that the explanatory role of representational kinds in scientific theories, in conjunction with a mainstream approach to explanation in cognitive (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  8. “Review of Machery’s ‘Doing without Concepts’”. [REVIEW]Edoardo Zamuner & Brian Ellis - forthcoming - Review of Metaphysics.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. From the Heterogeneity Problem to a Natural‐Kind Approach to Pleasure.Antonin Broi - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2):274-300.
    The heterogeneity problem, which stems from the alleged difficulty of finding out what all pleasant experiences have in common, is largely considered as a substantial issue in the philosophy of pleasure, one that is usually taken as the starting point for theorizing about the essence of pleasure. The goal of this paper is to move the focus away from the heterogeneity problem and toward an alternative approach to pleasure. To do this, I first show that, although the approach stemming from (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  10. Same-tracking real kinds in the social sciences.Theodore Bach - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-26.
    The kinds of real or natural kinds that support explanation and prediction in the social sciences are difficult to identify and track because they change through time, intersect with one another, and they do not always exhibit their properties when one encounters them. As a result, conceptual practices directed at these kinds will often refer in ways that are partial, equivocal, or redundant. To improve this epistemic situation, it is important to employ open-ended classificatory concepts, to understand when different research (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. An Intuitive Solution to the Problem of Induction.Andrew Dennis Bassford - 2022 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 26 (2):205-232.
    The subject of this essay is the classical problem of induction, which is sometimes attributed to David Hume and called “the Humean Problem of Induction.” Here, I examine a certain sort of Neo-Aristotelian solution to the problem, which appeals to the concept of natural kinds in its response to the inductive skeptic. This position is most notably represented by Howard Sankey and Marc Lange. The purpose of this paper is partly destructive and partly constructive. I raise two questions. The first (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  12. Symmetric relations, symmetric theories, and Pythagrapheanism.Tim Button - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    It is a metaphysical orthodoxy that interesting non-symmetric relations cannot be reduced to symmetric ones. This orthodoxy is wrong. I show this by exploring the expressive power of symmetric theories, i.e. theories which use only symmetric predicates. Such theories are powerful enough to raise the possibility of Pythagrapheanism, i.e. the possibility that the world is just a vast, unlabelled, undirected graph.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. Artifactual Normativity.Christopher Frugé - 2022 - Synthese 200 (126):1-19.
    A central tension shaping metaethical inquiry is that normativity appears to be subjective yet real, where it’s difficult to reconcile these aspects. On the one hand, normativity pertains to our actions and attitudes. On the other, normativity appears to be real in a way that precludes it from being a mere figment of those actions and attitudes. In this paper, I argue that normativity is indeed both subjective and real. I do so by way of treating it as a special (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  14. Pathological Withdrawal Syndrome: A New Kind of Depression?Katelynn V. Healy - 2022 - Inquiries Journal.
    Marion Godman makes the argument that Pathological Withdrawal Syndrome (PWS) makes the case for psychiatric disorders as a natural kind. Godman argues that we can classify kinds according to their shared ‘grounding’, but we need not know what the grounding is to know that the natural is a natural kind. However, I argue that Godman erroneously classifies PWS as its own natural kind when it is in fact a variant of depression, which is its own natural kind. Cooper highlights culture-bound (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15. An Account of Suhrawardī’s Allegories in Light of the Illuminationist Philosophy.Mahdi Homazadeh - 2022 - International Journal of Platonic Tradition 16:1-20.
    In this paper, I seek to explain Suhrawardī’s method of writing his allegories – how he draws upon his philosophical principles to construct forms and plots of his stories. To do so, I begin by delineating two key doctrines of his Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) ontology: the world of Forms (‘ālam al-muthul) and the discontinuous imaginal world (‘ālam al-mithāl al-munfaṣil). I provide an account of the history of these two doctrines and the nature of these two worlds, and then consider some of (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. Emotion.Charlie Kurth - 2022 - Routledge.
    Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers and have deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond. -/- This book explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the investigation around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  17. Possibility Precedes Actuality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2022 - Erkenntnis:1-21.
    This paper is inspired by and develops on E. J. Lowe’s work, who writes in his book The Possibility of Metaphysics that ‘metaphysical possibility is an inescapable determinant of actuality’ (1998: 9). Metaphysics deals with possibilities – metaphysical possibilities – but is not able to determine what is actual without the help of empirical research. Accordingly, a delimitation of the space of possibilities is required. The resulting – controversial – picture is that we generally need to know whether something is (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  18. Više je ipak bolje: Epistemički interesi i prirodne vrste (eng. The more the merrier: Epistemic interests and natural kinds).Mladen Bošnjak & Zdenka Brzović - 2021 - Prolegomena: Journal of Philosophy 20 (2):235-259.
    In this paper, we focus on the propensity toward identifying natural kinds with successful scientific categories in contemporary discussions of natural kinds within the philosophy of science. Success in this case is understood as the fulfillment of epistemic interests or goals in a given field of scientific research. The prevailing view is that, in order to have a theory of natural kinds that successfully captures current scientific practice, the relevant epistemic interests are the current interests of scientists working in a (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Two approaches to natural kinds.Judith K. Crane - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12177-12198.
    Philosophical treatments of natural kinds are embedded in two distinct projects. I call these the philosophy of science approach and the philosophy of language approach. Each is characterized by its own set of philosophical questions, concerns, and assumptions. The kinds studied in the philosophy of science approach are projectible categories that can ground inductive inferences and scientific explanation. The kinds studied in the philosophy of language approach are the referential objects of a special linguistic category—natural kind terms—thought to refer directly. (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  20. Free actions as a natural kind.Oisín Deery - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):823-843.
    Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  21. Can the Epistemic Value of Natural Kinds Be Explained Independently of Their Metaphysics?Catherine Kendig & John Grey - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):359-376.
    The account of natural kinds as stable property clusters is premised on the possibility of separating the epistemic value of natural kinds from their underlying metaphysics. On that account, the co-instantiation of any sub-cluster of the properties associated with a given natural kind raises the probability of the co-instantiation of the rest, and this clustering of property instantiation is invariant under all relevant counterfactual perturbations. We argue that it is not possible to evaluate the stability of a cluster of properties (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  22. Are sexes natural kinds?Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2021 - In Shamik Dasgupta, Ravit Dotan & Brad Weslake (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. New York: Routledge. pp. 163-176.
    Asking whether the sexes are natural kinds amounts to asking whether the categories, female and male, identify real divisions in nature, like the distinctions between biological species, or whether they mark merely artificial or arbitrary distinctions. The distinction between females and males in the animal kingdom is based on the relative size of the gametes they produce, with females producing larger gametes (ova) and males producing smaller gametes (sperm). This chapter argues that the properties of producing relatively large and small (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  23. Etiological Kinds.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (1):1-21.
    Kinds that share historical properties are dubbed “historical kinds” or “etiological kinds,” and they have some distinctive features. I will try to characterize etiological kinds in general terms and briefly survey some previous philosophical discussions of these kinds. Then I will take a closer look at a few case studies involving different types of etiological kinds. Finally, I will try to understand the rationale for classifying on the basis of etiology, putting forward reasons for classifying phenomena on the basis of (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  24. Generics and the Metaphysics of Kinds.David Liebesman & Rachel Katharine Sterken - 2021 - Philosophy Compass (7):1-14.
    Recent years have seen renewed interest in the semantics of generics. And a relatively mainstream view in this work is that the semantics of generics must appeal to kinds. But what are kinds? Can we learn anything about their nature by looking at how semantic theories of generics appeal to them? In this article, we overview recent work on the semantics of generics and consider their consequences for our understanding of the metaphysics of kinds.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  25. Words, Species, and Kinds.J. T. M. Miller - 2021 - Metaphysics 4 (1):18–31.
    It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  26. Homeostatic Property Cluster Theory without Homeostatic Mechanisms: Two Recent Attempts and their Costs.Yukinori Onishi & Davide Serpico - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie (N/A):61-82.
    The homeostatic property cluster theory is widely influential for its ability to account for many natural-kind terms in the life sciences. However, the notion of homeostatic mechanism has never been fully explicated. In 2009, Carl Craver interpreted the notion in the sense articulated in discussions on mechanistic explanation and pointed out that the HPC account equipped with such notion invites interest-relativity. In this paper, we analyze two recent refinements on HPC: one that avoids any reference to the causes of the (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  27. Indeterminacy and reference: comments on Roads to Reference. [REVIEW]Panu Raatikainen - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):987-994.
    Roads to Reference: An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language by Mario Gómez-Torrente provides an ample attack against certain more recent variants of descriptivism in the theory of reference. The book discusses a wide variety of expressions, but the focus of this short note is on proper names and natural kind terms. In the case of proper names, indeterminacy plays an important role in Gómez-Torrente’s critical argument. Some questions related to it are raised. As to natural kind terms, the (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Natural kind terms again.Panu Raatikainen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-17.
    The new externalist picture of natural kind terms due to Kripke, Putnam, and others has become quite popular in philosophy. Many philosophers of science have remained sceptical. Häggqvist and Wikforss have recently criticised this view severely. They contend it depends essentially on a micro-essentialist view of natural kinds that is widely rejected among philosophers of science, and that a scientifically reasonable metaphysics entails the resurrection of some version of descriptivism. It is argued in this paper that the situation is not (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  29. Induction and Natural Kinds Revisited.Howard Sankey - 2021 - In Benjamin Hill, Henrik Lagerlund & Stathis Psillos (eds.), Reconsidering Causal Powers: Historical and Conceptual Perspectives. Oxford University Press. pp. 284-299.
    In ‘Induction and Natural Kinds’, I proposed a solution to the problem of induction according to which our use of inductive inference is reliable because it is grounded in the natural kind structure of the world. When we infer that unobserved members of a kind will have the same properties as observed members of the kind, we are right because all members of the kind possess the same essential properties. The claim that the existence of natural kinds is what grounds (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  30. An ontology of weak entity realism for HPC kinds.Reuben Sass - 2021 - Synthese 198 (12):11861-11880.
    This paper defends an ontology of weak entity realism for homeostatic property cluster (HPC) theories of natural kinds, adapted from Bird’s (Synthese 195(4):1397–1426, 2018) taxonomy of such theories. Weak entity realism about HPC kinds accepts the existence of natural kinds. Weak entity realism denies two theses: that (1) HPC kinds have mind-independent essences, and that (2) HPC kinds reduce to entities, such as complex universals, posited only by metaphysical theories. Strong entity realism accepts (1) and (2), whereas moderate entity realism (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. Unity of Science.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Unity of science was once a very popular idea among both philosophers and scientists. But it has fallen out of fashion, largely because of its association with reductionism and the challenge from multiple realisation. Pluralism and the disunity of science are the new norm, and higher-level natural kinds and special science laws are considered to have an important role in scientific practice. What kind of reductionism does multiple realisability challenge? What does it take to reduce one phenomenon to another? How (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  32. Philosophy of Psychiatry.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  33. Identifying the Explanatory Domain of the Looping Effect: Congruent and Incongruent Feedback Mechanisms of Interactive Kinds.Tuomas Vesterinen - 2021 - Journal of Social Ontology 6 (2):1-27.
    Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society. -/- Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  34. The Animal Sexes as Historical Explanatory Kinds.Laura Franklin-Hall - 2020 - In Shamik Dasgupta, Ravit Dotan & Brad Weslake (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Routledge. pp. 177-197.
    Though biologists identify individuals as ‘male’ or ‘female’ across a broad range of animal species, the particular traits exhibited by males and females can vary tremendously. This diversity has led some to conclude that cross-animal sexes (males, or females, of whatever animal species) have “little or no explanatory power” (Dupré 1986: 447) and, thus, are not natural kinds in any traditional sense. This essay will explore considerations for and against this conclusion, ultimately arguing that the animal sexes, properly understood, are (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  35. Essential Properties are Super-Explanatory: Taming Metaphysical Modality.Marion Godman, Antonella Mallozzi & David Papineau - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association (3):1-19.
    This paper aims to build a bridge between two areas of philosophical research, the structure of kinds and metaphysical modality. Our central thesis is that kinds typically involve super-explanatory properties, and that these properties are therefore metaphysically essential to natural kinds. Philosophers of science who work on kinds tend to emphasize their complexity, and are generally resistant to any suggestion that they have “essences”. The complexities are real enough, but they should not be allowed to obscure the way that kinds (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  36. note on Sorites series.Friedrich Wilhelm Grafe - 2020 - Archive.Org.
    Vagueness does not necessarily come in with vague predicates, nor need it be expressed by them , but undoubtedly 'vague predicates' are traditionally in the focus of main stream discussions of vagueness. In her current modal logic presentation and discussion of the Sorites paradox Susanne Bobzien[1] lists among the properties of a Sorites series a rather weak modal tolerance principle governing the 'grey zone' containing the borderline cases of the Sorites series, which later proves crucial for her solution of the (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  37. Kinds and Essences: Rescuing the New Biological Essentialism.Markel Kortabarria - 2020 - Dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona
    After the rise of Darwin’s theory of evolution it seemed that the much-feared ghost of traditional essentialism had disappeared from biology. However, developments of the last century in analytic metaphysics (Kripke, Putnam, Wiggins) appear to have resurrected the Aristotelian monster in various forms. The aim of this paper is to investigate the revival of the essentialist doctrine as applied to biological species, namely the thesis that organisms belong to a particular natural kind in virtue of possessing certain essential properties, and (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  38. The New LeDoux: Survival Circuits and the Surplus Meaning of ‘Fear’.Raamy Majeed - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (281):809-829.
    ABSTRACT LeDoux's pioneering work on the neurobiology of fear has played a crucial role in informing debates in the philosophy of emotion. For example, it plays a key part in Griffiths’ argument for why emotions don’t form a natural kind. Likewise, it is employed by Faucher and Tappolet to defend pro-emotion views, which claim that emotions aid reasoning. LeDoux, however, now argues that his work has been misread. He argues that using emotion terms, like ‘fear’, to describe neurocognitive data adds (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  39. The ontology of words: Realism, nominalism, and eliminativism.J. T. M. Miller - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (7):e12691.
    What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  40. On the individuation of words.J. T. M. Miller - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (8):875-884.
    ABSTRACT The idea that two words can be instances of the same word is a central intuition in our conception of language. This fact underlies many of the claims that we make about how we communicate, and how we understand each other. Given this, irrespective of what we think words are, it is common to think that any putative ontology of words, must be able to explain this feature of language. That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  41. Existence Predicates.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - Synthese 197 (1):311-335.
    Natural languages generally distinguishes among different existence predicates for different types of entities, such as English 'exist', 'occur', and 'obtain'. The paper gives an in-depth discussion and analysis of a range of existence predicates in natural language within the general project of descriptive metaphysics, or more specifically ‘natural language ontology’.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  42. Where Do You Get Your Protein? Or: Biochemical Realization.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (3):799-825.
    Biochemical kinds such as proteins pose interesting problems for philosophers of science, as they can be studied from the points of view of both biology and chemistry. The relationship between the biological functions of biochemical kinds and the microstructures that they are related to is the key question. This leads us to a more general discussion about ontological reductionism, microstructuralism, and multiple realization at the biology-chemistry interface. On the face of it, biochemical kinds seem to pose a challenge for ontological (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  43. Real Kinds in Real Time: On Responsible Social Modeling.Theodore Bach - 2019 - The Monist 102 (2):236-258.
    There is broad agreement among social researchers and social ontologists that the project of dividing humans into social kinds should be guided by at least two methodological commitments. First, a commitment to what best serves moral and political interests, and second, a commitment to describing accurately the causal structures of social reality. However, researchers have not sufficiently analyzed how these two commitments interact and constrain one another. In the absence of that analysis, several confusions have set in, threatening to undermine (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  44. Aphantasia, SDAM, and Episodic Memory.Lajos Brons - 2019 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 28:9-32.
    Episodic memory (EM) involves re-experiencing past experiences by means of mental imagery. Aphantasics (who lack mental imagery) and people with severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM) lack the ability to re-experience, which would imply that they don't have EM. However, aphantasics and people with SDAM have personal and affective memories, which are other defining aspects of EM (in addition to re-experiencing). This suggests that these supposed aspects of EM really are independent faculties or modules of memory, and that EM is a (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  45. Macroscopic Metaphysics: middle-sized objects and longish processes, by Paul Needham. [REVIEW]Louis Caruana - 2019 - Gregorianum 100 (2):436-437.
    Many assume that any complex thing or situation is reducible to its elemental building blocks and the relations between them. Needham’s book goes against this trend by seeking to rehabilitate macroscopic considerations and insisting that resorting to smaller and smaller subunits does not always help.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  46. Bundle Theory with Kinds.Markku Keinänen & Tuomas E. Tahko - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (277):838-857.
    Is it possible to get by with just one ontological category? We evaluate L.A. Paul's attempt to do so: the mereological bundle theory. The upshot is that Paul's attempt to construct a one category ontology may be challenged with some of her own arguments. In the positive part of the paper we outline a two category ontology with property universals and kind universals. We will also examine Paul's arguments against a version of universal bundle theory that takes spatiotemporal co-location instead (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  47. Eleaticism and Socratic Dialectic: On Ontology, Philosophical Inquiry, and Estimations of Worth in Plato’s Parmenides, Sophist and Statesman.Jens Kristian Larsen - 2019 - Études Platoniciennes 19 (19).
    The Parmenides poses the question for what entities there are Forms, and the criticism of Forms it contains is commonly supposed to document an ontological reorientation in Plato. According to this reading, Forms no longer express the excellence of a given entity and a Socratic, ethical perspective on life, but come to resemble concepts, or what concepts designate, and are meant to explain nature as a whole. Plato’s conception of dialectic, it is further suggested, consequently changes into a value-neutral method (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  48. Philosophy of Ethnobiology: Understanding Knowledge Integration and Its Limitations. Journal of Ethnobiology.David Ludwig & Charbel El-Hani - 2019 - Journal of Ethnobiology 39.
    Ethnobiology has become increasingly concerned with applied and normative issues such as climate change adaptation, forest management, and sustainable agriculture. Applied ethnobiology emphasizes the practical importance of local and traditional knowledge in tackling these issues but thereby also raises complex theoretical questions about the integration of heterogeneous knowledge systems. The aim of this article is to develop a framework for addressing questions of integration through four core domains of philosophy -epistemology, ontology, value theory, and political theory. In each of these (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  49. Ethnoontology: Ways of world‐building across cultures.David Ludwig & Daniel A. Weiskopf - 2019 - Philosophy Compass (9):1-11.
    This article outlines a program of ethnoontology that brings together empirical research in the ethnosciences with ontological debates in philosophy. First, we survey empirical evidence from heterogeneous cultural contexts and disciplines. Second, we propose a model of cross‐cultural relations between ontologies beyond a simple divide between universalist and relativist models. Third, we argue for an integrative model of ontology building that synthesizes insights from different fields such as biological taxonomy, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, and political ecology. We conclude by arguing (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  50. Natural Name Theory and Linguistic Kinds.J. T. M. Miller - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (9):494-508.
    The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
1 — 50 / 152