Natural kinds, normative kinds and human behavior

Emotions as Natural and Normative Kinds

In earlier work I have claimed that emotion and some emotions are not 'natural kinds'. Here I clarify what I mean by 'natural kind', suggest a new and more accurate term, and discuss the objection that emotion and emotions are not descriptive categories at all, but fundamentally normative categories. 1. Introduction. It is unlikely that all the psychological states and processes that fall under...

Naturalization without Natural Kinds:

Naturalization without Natural Kinds: On the prospects of a unified theory of religion. From the propagation of religion, it is not hard to understand the causes of the resolution of the same into its first seeds or principles; which are only an opinion of a deity, and powers invisible and supernatural; that can never be so abolished out of human nature but that new religions may again be made ...

Semantic Natural Kinds Brendan

The first of the two sentences in (1) entails the second; necessarily, if the first is true then so is the second. Moreover, (1) is an instance of a more general pattern whose validity doesn’t seem to depend on the specific meanings of the words in (1). The adverb ‘quickly’, for example, can be replaced with any of a wide range of adverbs without loss of validity; analogous remarks hold for the...

What are natural kinds ?

Are Emotions Natural Kinds?

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)-that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified obje...