PHIL 203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Natural Kind, Nominalism, Reductionism
Document Summary
Sources of truth that are genuinely in the world, but outside the scope of natural sciences i. e the implicit meaning behind the mona lisa. Denies the thesis of reductionism: being the claim that any property in the world has to be expressible or applicable in vocabulary or by methods of the natural sciences. Elgin denies a difference between social and natural kinds, argues that they are all social. There is a lot of fictionalizing in the natural sciences: i. e average canadian family has 2. 4 kids, astrophysicists pretend planets are merely points. Hacking"s argument is definitive in organizing people into homosexuals, split personalities and abused children. He says we ought to be realists about natural kinds and nominalists about social kinds. Only realism can account for the success of science. Hacking opts for nominalism about the anthropic realm. If the world actually divides into natural kinds, then some examples must be a coincidence of enormous proportions.
