Last Chance Saloons for Natural Kind Realism
| Autor: | Anjan Chakravartty |
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| Rok vydání: | 2023 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Philosophical Quarterly. 60:63-81 |
| ISSN: | 2152-1123 0003-0481 |
| DOI: | 10.5406/21521123.60.1.06 |
| Popis: | 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 conventionalism, but not compatible with a traditional realism about kinds specifically. Moreover, hopes of achieving compatibility by revising and extending kind realism—into what I call “hyperrealism”—face an insuperable dilemma. The news for realists is not all bad, however: though kind realism proves untenable, closely associated realisms underlying the objectivity of kind discourse may be viable nonetheless. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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