Carving Nature at Its Joints Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science

by Campbell, Joseph Keim; O'Rourke, Michael; Slater, Matthew H.

• ISBN13: 9780262516266
• ISBN10: 0262516268
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-28
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato's Phaedrus: successful theories should "carve nature at its joints." But is nature really "jointed"? Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification. The contributors consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics. Carving Nature at Its Joints offers both breadth and thematic unity, providing a sampling of state-of-the-art work in contemporary analytic philosophy that will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students concerned with classification.

Author Biography

Joseph Keim Campbell is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Washington State University. Michael O'Rourke is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Idaho. Matthew H. Slater is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Bucknell University. Campbell and O'Rourke are coeditors of previous volumes in the Topics in Contemporary Philosophy series published by the MIT Press, the most recent of which is Actions, Ethics, and Responsibility (2010).

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
introduction: Lessons from the Scientific Butchery	p. 1
Induction, Samples, and Kinds	p. 33
It Takes More Than All Kinds to Make a World	p. 53
Lange and Laws, Kinds, and Counterfactuals	p. 85
Are Fundamental Laws Necessary or Contingent?	p. 97
Para-Natural Kinds	p. 113
Boundaries, Conventions, and Realism	p. 129
Natural Kinds and Biological Realisms	p. 155
Three Ways of Resisting Essentialism about Natural Kinds	p. 175
Arthritis and Nature's Joints	p. 199
Predicting Populations by Modeling Individuals	p. 231
Similarity and Species Concepts	p. 253
Species Concepts and Natural Goodness	p. 289
How to Think about the Free Will/Determinism Problem	p. 313
Contributors	p. 341
Index	p. 343
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