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| Question | Answer |
| Natural Kinds | Are there some categories—kinds—that are discovered rather than created: natural kinds? |
| Natural Kinds: According to Plato | - “[I]t is dangerous…to chop reality up into small portions. It is always safer to go down the middle to make our cuts. The real cleavages among the forms are more likely to be found thus.” Two egs: - Greeks and barbarians v male and female 10,000 and all other numbers v odd and even |
| Natural Kinds: According to Coyne | “Strikingly, different biologists came up with nearly identical groupings [of animals and plants]. This means that these groupings are not subjective artifacts of a human need to classify, but tell us something real and fundamental about nature.” |
| Natural Kinds: According to JS Mill | 1. ”[T]he power of framing classes is unlimited.” 2. But there is a distinction between (a) those classes whose members share only the attribute used to pick them out, and (b) those that (we find out) share more. 3. Both are “natural,” but “the ends of language and of classification would be subverted” if we didn’t notice the second sort. Mill’s view shows that one can be, in a sense, a nominalist, and think that some kinds are a matter of discovery—are natural, if you chose that word. |
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