What are Natural Kinds ?

Plato Seeking for “One Real Explanation” in Phaedo

What this essay is to discuss is Plato''s theory of explanation in Phaedo. In this dialogue, we observe that Socrates criticizes both the natural scientists’ explanations and Anaxagoras’ theory of Mind since he thinks they could not explain all things, firstly, in a unitary and, secondary, in a real way. Thence, we are to call what Plato is seeking as his ideal explanation in Phaedo “One Real E...

What are natural kinds ?

Projection, symmetry, and natural kinds

Scientific practice involves two kinds of induction. In one, generalizations are drawn about the states of a particular system of variables. In the other, generalizations are drawn across systems in a class. We can discern two questions of correctness about both kinds of induction: (P1) what distinguishes those systems and classes of system that are ‘projectible’ in Nelson Goodman’s (1955) sens...

Water is Not H

In defending semantic externalism, philosophers of language have often assumed that there is a straightforward connection between scientific kinds and the natural kinds recognized by ordinary language users.1 For example, the claim that water is H2O assumes that the ordinary language kind water corresponds to a chemical kind, which contains all the molecules with molecular formula H2O as its me...

EDITORIAL Psychiatry and its objects

Whether natural, social or belletristic, all disciplines are related to objects considered as specifically their own. The fact that the objects of some (e.g. zoology, botany) are more easily recognized than those of others (e.g. Social Anthropology or History of Art) is conventionally explained by the claim that the former are ontologically independent. There is in our time a tendency to place ...