Broca’s Area Is Not a Natural Kind

Addiction is Not a Natural Kind

I argue that addiction is not an appropriate category to support generalizations for the purposes of scientific prediction. That is, addiction is not a natural kind. I discuss the Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) theory of kinds, according to which members of a kind share a cluster of properties generated by a common mechanism or set of mechanisms. Leading accounts of addiction in literature ...

Is Emotion a Natural Kind?

Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind*

In cognitive psychology, concepts are those data structures that are stored in long-term memory and are used by default in human beings’ higher cognitive processes (categorization, inductive and deductive reasoning...). Most psychologists of concepts assume that these mental representations share many scientifically important properties, and the psychology of concepts is expected to describe th...

How natural a kind is "eukaryote?".

Systematics balances uneasily between realism and nominalism, uncommitted as to whether biological taxa are discoveries or inventions. If the former, they might be taken as natural kinds. I briefly review some philosophers' concepts of natural kinds and then argue that several of these apply well enough to "eukaryote." Although there are some sticky issues around genomic chimerism and when euka...

What is episodic memory if it is a natural kind?