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  1. Historical Kinds in the Social World.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - forthcoming - Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
    This paper makes a distinction between ahistorical causal-functional kinds and historical kinds, which include both type- and token-historical kinds, some of which are “copied kinds.” After showing how these distinctions play out in various social sciences, a number of reasons are put forward for the historical individuation of some social kinds. As in the natural sciences, historical individuation in the social sciences can enable us to infer common causes, explain synchronic causal properties, and discover exceptions to causal regularities, among other (...)
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  • Natural Kinds (Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Science).Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2023 - Cambridge University Press.
    Scientists cannot devise theories, construct models, propose explanations, make predictions, or even carry out observations, without first classifying their subject matter. The goal of scientific taxonomy is to come up with classification schemes that conform to nature's own. Another way of putting this is that science aims to devise categories that correspond to 'natural kinds.' The interest in ascertaining the real kinds of things in nature is as old as philosophy itself, but it takes on a different guise when one (...)
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  • Two kinds of historical explanation in Evolutionary Biology.Nina Kranke - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (3):1-21.
    Historical explanations in evolutionary biology are commonly characterized as narrative explanations. Examples include explanations of the evolution of particular traits and explanations of macroevolutionary transitions. In this paper I present two case studies of explanations in accounts of pathogen evolution and host-pathogen coevolution, respectively, and argue that one of them is captured well by established accounts of time-sequenced narrative explanation. The other one differs from narrative explanations in important respects, even though it shares some characteristics with them as it is (...)
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  • Natural Kinds, Mind-independence, and Unification Principles.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-23.
    There have been many attempts to determine what makes a natural kind real, chief among them is the criterion according to which natural kinds must be mind-independent. But it is difficult to specify this criterion: many supposed natural kinds have an element of mind-dependence. I will argue that the mind-independence criterion is nevertheless a good one, if correctly understood: the mind-independence criterion concerns the unification principles for natural kinds. Unification principles determine how natural kinds unify their properties, and only those (...)
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  • Natural Kind Essentialism.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2024 - In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 156-168.
    Natural kind essentialism is a specification of the intuitive idea that there are some mind-independent or objective categories in nature. These categories are thought to be characterised by a shared essence, which may involve intrinsic or extrinsic properties, mechanisms, or causal history. While the ontological basis of natural kinds has its roots in antiquity and especially Aristotle, the contemporary notion of a “natural kind” in philosophical discussion is often traced to William Whewell’s and John Stuart Mill’s work in the 1800s. (...)
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  • Biochemical Kinds and the Unity of Science.Francesca Bellazzi - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Bristol
    The present thesis explores some metaphysical issues concerning biochemical kinds and the relations between chemical and biological properties and phenomena. The main result of this thesis is that there is something sui generis about biochemical kinds. This result is motivated by two theoretical steps. The first is characterising biochemical functions as weakly emergent from the chemical structure [Chapter 3, Chapter 6]. The second is via an account for which biochemical kinds are natural categories [Chapter 4, Chapter 7]. The thesis comprises (...)
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  • Genericity generalized.Alnica Visser - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (3):703-723.
    In his _Between Logic and the World_, in the course of presenting his theory of generics, Nickel (Between logic and the world, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a theory of characteristicness, or “genericity”, which states that a property is characteristic for a kind if and only if its presence among the members of that kind is explicable by some explanatory domain that recognizes the existence of that kind in the course of engaging the explanatory strategies made available by that (...)
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  • Last Chance Saloons for Natural Kind Realism.Anjan Chakravartty - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (1):63-81.
    Traditionally, accounts of natural kinds have run the gamut from strongly conventionalist to strongly realist views. Recently, however, there has been a significant shift toward more conventionalist-sounding positions, even (perhaps especially) among philosophers interested in scientific classification. The impetus for this is a trend toward making anthropocentric features of categories, namely, capacities to facilitate human epistemic (and other) interests via inductive inference, central to an account of kinds. I argue that taking these features seriously is both defensible and compatible with (...)
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  • The Gene as a Natural Kind.Francesca Bellazzi - 2023 - In José Manuel Viejo & Mariano Sanjuán (eds.), Life and Mind - New Directions in the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences. Springer. pp. pp 259–278.
    What is a gene? Does it represent a natural kind, or is it just a tool for genomics? A clear answer to these questions has been challenged by postgenomic discoveries. In response, I will argue that the gene can be deemed a natural kind as it satisfies some requirements for genuine kindhood. Specifically, natural kinds are projectible categories in our best scientific theories, and they represent nodes in the causal network of the world (as in Khalidi. Natural Categories and Human (...)
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