PHIL 209B Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Anti-Realism, Natural Kind
30 Oct 2014
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Document Summary
Species, natural kinds, essence: what is a natural kind, a set of things that have in common a number of scientifically important properties, properties cluster together because of some further underlying mechanism they have. Realism about natural kinds: our classification aim at the correct classification of things. 3. this presupposes of course that there is a correct classification there are particular things and there are also universals: universals are things that can be instantiated, a particular thing is an instance of a universal. I am an instance of the universal human being this desk is an instance of the color brown. 1. there are just particular things: we categorize things because we notice certain similarities, we might just as well have noticed different similarities and categorized things differently. 4. these alternative categorizations are really equally good insofar as they serve whatever purposes we have in categorizing things. 1. talks about the arbitrariness of distinguishing varieties from species.
