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  1. Naturalness, Scientific Concepts, and the Substantivity of Social Metaphysics.Igor Douven - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (4):849-863.
    We argue that concepts from the social sciences can be as natural as those from physics and chemistry, thereby answering in the positive the question of whether social metaphysics is or can be substantive. The argument takes as a starting point Douven & Gärdenfors’ (Mind & Language, 35, 313–334 2020) optimality account of natural concepts, according to which natural concepts are represented by the cells of an optimally partitioned similarity space. While the account applies straightforwardly to perceptual concepts, it does (...)
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  • A defense of placeholder essentialism.Safia Bano - 2023 - Foundations of Chemistry 25 (3):393-404.
    Kripke-Putnam argument for natural kind essentialism can be said to depend on placeholder essentialist intuitions. But some argue that such philosophical intuitions are merely preschooler cognitive biases which are not supported by scientific knowledge of natural kinds. Chemical substances, for instance, whether elements or compounds do not have such privileged set of underlying properties (‘same substance’ relation) which are present in all members of the kind and which provide necessary and sufficient condition for kind membership. In this paper, I argue (...)
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  • The Epistemological Relevance of Conceptual Change.Jasper Liptow - 2022 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 99 (3):449-473.
    The purpose of this article is to show that the customary understanding of epistemic progress as a kind of belief change is incomplete and that conceptual change has to be acknowledged as a crucial driving force in epistemic progress. The author’s argument for the epistemological relevance of conceptual change proceeds as follows. First, he develops an account of conceptual change that clearly distinguishes conceptual change from belief change. He then takes a closer look at two kinds of conceptual change that (...)
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  • Natural kinds, chemical practice, and interpretive communities. [REVIEW]Clevis Headley - 2023 - Foundations of Chemistry 25 (1):167-187.
    Many philosophers attribute extraordinary importance to the idea of natural kinds seemingly intimating that the very possibility of certain kinds of activity are ontologically beholden to the existence of kinds. Specifically, regarding chemistry, Brian Ellis intimated that the success of any plausible metaphysical essentialism depends upon its “reliance on examples from chemistry.” Ellis’s view is representative of a tradition in analytic philosophy that has utilized chemical examples as paradigmatic natural kinds. In this regard, Kripke and Putnam emerge as the architects (...)
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  • Chemical substance, material, product, goods, waste: a changing ontology.Luigi Cerruti & Elena Ghibaudi - 2017 - Foundations of Chemistry 19 (2):97-123.
    A chemical substance is instantiated in the material world by a number of quantities of such substance, placed in different locations. A change of location implies a change in the net of relationships entertained by the QCS with the region wherein it is found. This fact entails changes of the ontological status of the CS, as this is not fully determined by the inherent features of the CS and includes a relevant relational contribution. In order to demonstrate this thesis, we (...)
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  • Natural Kind Essentialism Revisited.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2015 - Mind 124 (495):795-822.
    Recent work on Natural Kind Essentialism has taken a deflationary turn. The assumptions about the grounds of essentialist truths concerning natural kinds familiar from the Kripke-Putnam framework are now considered questionable. The source of the problem, however, has not been sufficiently explicated. The paper focuses on the Twin Earth scenario, and it will be demonstrated that the essentialist principle at its core (which I call IDENT)—that necessarily, a sample of a chemical substance, A, is of the same kind as another (...)
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  • Is Water Necessarily Identical to H2O?Barnett David - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 98 (1):95-108.
    The “scientific essentialist” doctrine asserts that the following are examples of a posteriori necessary identities: water is H2O; gold is the element with atomic number 79; and heat is the motion of molecules. Evidence in support of this assertion, however, is difficult to find. Both Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke have argued convincingly for the existence of a posteriori necessities. Furthermore, Kripke has argued for the existence of a posteriori necessary identities in regard to a particular class of statements involving (...)
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  • Soames’s Deflationism About Modality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (6):1367-1379.
    One type of deflationism about metaphysical modality suggests that it can be analysed strictly in terms of linguistic or conceptual content and that there is nothing particularly metaphysical about modality. Scott Soames is explicitly opposed to this trend. However, a detailed study of Soames’s own account of modality reveals that it has striking similarities with the deflationary account. In this paper I will compare Soames’s account of a posteriori necessities concerning natural kinds with the deflationary one, specifically Alan Sidelle’s account, (...)
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  • Philosophy of chemistry as intercultural philosophy: Jaap van Brakel. [REVIEW]Klaus Ruthenberg & Rom Harré - 2012 - Foundations of Chemistry 14 (3):193-203.
    After a brief biography of Jaap van Brakel we set out his appropriation and use of the distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of the world. In a certain sense van Brakel gives priority to the manifest image as the ultimate source of meaning in chemical discourses. He does not take sides in the debate about nominal and real essences, twin earths and so, but presents a compromise. As an active practitioner of the chemical arts he emphasises (...)
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  • No, water (still) doesn’t have a microstructural essence.Sören Häggqvist - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (2):1-13.
    Häggqvist and Wikforss argued that in the case of so-called natural kind terms, semantic externalism relies on an untenable metaphysics of kinds: microessentialism. They further claimed that this metaphysics fails, for largely empirical reasons. Focussing on the case of water, Hoefer and Martí European Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 9, rejoin that suitably construed, microessentialism is correct. I argue that their defence of microessentialism fails.
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  • Natural Kinds and Natural Kind Terms: Myth and Reality.Sören Häggqvist & Åsa Wikforss - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4):911-933.
    The article examines the role of natural kinds in semantic theorizing, which has largely been conducted in isolation from relevant work in science, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. We argue that the Kripke–Putnam account of natural kind terms, despite recent claims to the contrary, depends on a certain metaphysics of natural kinds; that the metaphysics usually assumed—micro-essentialism—is untenable even in a ‘placeholder’ version; and that the currently popular homeostatic property cluster theory of natural kinds is correct only to an extent (...)
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  • Units of measurement and natural kinds: Some kripkean considerations.Jan Van Brakel - 1990 - Erkenntnis 33 (3):297-317.
    Kripke has argued that definitions of units of measurements provide examples of statements that are both contingent and a priori. In this paper I argue that definitions of units of measurement are intended to be stipulations of what Kripke calls "theoretical identities": a stipulation that two terms will have the same rigid designation. Hence such a definition is both a priori and necessary. The necessity arises because such definitions appeal to natural kind properties only, which on Kripke's account are necessary.
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  • Microessentialism: What is the Argument?Paul Needham - 2011 - Noûs 45 (1):1-21.
    According to microessentialism, it is necessary to resort to microstructure in order to adequately characterise chemical substances such as water. But the thesis has never been properly supported by argument. Kripke and Putnam, who originally proposed the thesis, suggest that a so-called stereotypical characterisation is not possible, whereas one in terms of microstructure is. However, the sketchy outlines given of stereotypical descriptions hardly support the impossibility claim. On the other hand, what naturally stands in contrast to microscopic description is description (...)
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  • Parthood and part–whole relations in Zulu language and culture.C. Maria Keet & Langa Khumalo - 2020 - Applied ontology 15 (3):361-384.
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  • Stuff versus individuals.Lucía Lewowicz & Olimpia Lombardi - 2012 - Foundations of Chemistry 15 (1):65-77.
    The general question to be considered in this paper points to the nature of the world described by chemistry: what is macro-chemical ontology like? In particular, we want to identify the ontological categories that underlie chemical discourse and chemical practice. This is not an easy task, because modern Western metaphysics was strongly modeled by theoretical physics. For this reason, we attempt to answer our question by contrasting macro-chemical ontology with the mainstream ontology of physics and of traditional metaphysics. In particular, (...)
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  • On Chemical Natural Kinds.Eric R. Scerri - 2020 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 51 (3):427-445.
    A critique of LaPorte's views on chemical kinds, like jade and ruby, is presented. More positively, a new slant is provided on the question of whether elements are natural kinds. This is carried out by appeal to the dual nature of elements, a topic that has been debated in the philosophy of chemistry but not in the natural kinds literature. It is claimed that the abstract notion of elements, as opposed to their being simple substances, is relevant to the Kripke–Putnam (...)
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  • The stuff of conventionalism.Thomas A. Blackson - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 68 (1):65 - 81.
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  • Matter, Structure, and Change: Aspects of the Philosophy of Chemistry.Michael Weisberg & Paul Needham - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (10):927-937.
    This article is an overview of some of the contemporary debates in philosophy of chemistry. We discuss the nature of chemical substances, the individuation of chemical kinds, the relationship between chemistry and physics, and the nature of the chemical bond.
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  • Philosophy, natural kinds, microstructuralism, and the (mis)use of chemical examples: intimacy versus integrity as orientations towards chemical practice.Clevis Headley - 2020 - Foundations of Chemistry 22 (3):489-500.
    This essay critically considers the issue of natural kind essentialism. More specifically, the essay critically probes the philosophical use of chemical examples to support realism about natural kinds. My simple contention is that the natural kind debate can be understood in terms of two different cultures of academic production. These two cultures will be conceptualized using Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity as cultural orientations. Acknowledging Kasulis’s contention that, “What is foreground in one culture may be background in another”, (...)
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  • Substance and Time.Paul Needham - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (3):485-512.
    ‘Water is H 2 O’ is naturally construed as an equivalence. What are the things to which the two predicates ‘is water’ and ‘is H 2 O’ apply? The equivalence presupposes that substance properties are distinguished from phase properties. A substance like water (H 2 O) exhibits various phases (solid, liquid, gas) under appropriate conditions, and a given (say liquid) phase may comprise several substances. What general features distinguish substance from phase properties? I tackle these questions on the basis of (...)
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  • Natural Kind Thingamajigs.Paul Needham - 2012 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (1):97 - 101.
    I criticize the treatment of natural kinds as some sort of object, advocated in a recent paper by Alexander Bird. The arguments he gives for regimenting an illustrative statement featuring chemical kinds in his preferred manner are not conclusive, and his criticisms of an alternative strategy involving universally quantified sentences fail. This is important because of the widespread but poorly supported assumption that expressions of natural kinds should be treated as singular referring terms.
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  • Judgements, Expertise, and Counterfactuals.Sören Häggqvist - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8):741-754.
    In The Philosophy of Philosophy, Tim Williamson has offered a sophisticated account of thought experiments and of modal epistemology. More recently, he has also engaged in a variant of the so-called ‘expertise defence’ of traditional philosophical methodology. In this paper I argue that if Williamson’s account of thought experiments and of modal epistemology is right, this seriously undermines his version of the expertise defence.
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