What kinds of museums for what kinds of societies?

What are natural kinds ?

What are Natural Kinds ?

1. Two Questions Distinguish two questions about natural kinds. First, the naturalness question: what, if anything, makes a natural kind natural? Perhaps the members of a natural kind, unlike the members of an arbitrary group, stand in some natural similarity relation to one another. Perhaps they share an essence or some other natural feature. Or perhaps, as conventionalists argue, the boundari...

What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders?

This essay explores four answers to the question 'What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders?' Essentialist kinds are classes whose members share an essence from which their defining features arise. Although elegant and appropriate for some physical (e.g. atomic elements) and medical (e.g. Mendelian disorders) phenomena, this model is inappropriate for psychiatric disorders, which are multi...

Different Kinds of Concepts and Different Kinds of Words: What Words Do for Human Cognition

Different kinds of concepts and different kinds of words: What words do for human cognition Introduction This book addresses the nature of concepts. A consideration of human concepts is incomplete without also considering language. Language is a fundamental human capacity, one that permits us to express our own concepts and to influence the concepts of others. Although humans and non-humans ali...

What Kinds of Knowledge are Needed for Genuine Understanding?∗

Crucial considerations in launching knowledge acquisitions projects aimed at human-like understanding and reasoning include the choice of semantic / knowledge representation (SR/KR), the types of knowledge required and their use in understanding and inference, and approaches to acquiring that knowledge. This paper argues that the SR/KR needs to resemble language in its expressivity and needs to...