Monday, May 14th, 2018.
3:00 pm.
Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, Room A2.
[The video of the talk will be available soon]
Abstract:
Contemporary discussion on natural kinds has it that a satisfactory account of natural kinds should provide the criteria to draw a sharp borderline between natural and nonnatural kinds (e.g. natural kind essentialists, for instance, consider that the criterion for natural kindness is possessing an essence that determines the necessary and sufficient conditions for kind membership). In this paper, I contend that such dichotomical accounts are problematic in various ways. Either they are too restrictive and exclude many scientific categories that we would like, presumably, to keep calling ‘natural’ or, instead, they fail to provide solid criteria to draw the ontological distinction it is intended. I suggest, thus, to adopt a gradual notion of naturalness that enables us not only to assess whether a kind is natural or not, but, more importantly, to determine whether a kind is more or less natural than another.
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