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Natural Kinds and Freaks of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Evan Fales
Evan Fales*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of Iowa
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Abstract

Essentialism—understood as the doctrine that there are natural kinds—can be sustained with respect to the most fundamental physical entities of the world, as I elsewhere argue. In this paper I take up the question of the existence of natural kinds among complex structures built out of these elementary ones. I consider a number of objections to essentialism, in particular Locke's puzzle about the existence of borderline cases. A number of recent attempts to justify biological taxonomy are critically examined. I conclude that theory partially justifies such taxonomies but supports only a weaker form of essentialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 67 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I should like to thank the two anonymous referees whose criticisms were extremely helpful.

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