Search results for "Natural kind"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
How not to Resist the Natural Kind Talk in Biology
2019
Abstract: After the dawn of the traditional, essentialist view of natural kinds in contemporary philosophy (exacerbated in philosophy of biology by “population thinking”), non-essentialist cluster conceptions of natural kinds have been extensively supported and applied to numerous biological categories. However, salient philosophers have put forward two challenging arguments against cluster kind theories. I argue that, in both cases, discontent with a cluster conception of natural kinds is motivated by tacit and previous assumptions that can be challenged. I conclude that the concerns expressed in the objections do not make good reasons to resist natural kinds talk in biology unless one is …
Al-Ghazāī on the Signification of Names
2010
AbstractAl-Ghazālī’s most detailed explanation of how signification works occurs in his treatise on The Beautiful Names of God. Al-Ghazālī builds squarely on the commentary tradition on Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias: words signify things by means of concepts and correspondingly, existence is laid out on three levels, linguistic, conceptual, and particular (i.e. extramental). This framework allows al-Ghazālī to put forward what is essentially an Aristotelian reading of what happens when a name successfully picks out a being: when a quiddity is named by some kind term, its referent in the mind is formally identical to the quiddity of an individual existent which belongs to that natural kind. Al…
Defining Life as a Non-Essentialist Natural Kind
2019
Abstract: The increasing number of proposals to define the concept of life in biology has led some authors to consider this task useless and without sense. All sceptics base their argument on the idea that life is a natural kind with a strong metaphysical commitment. Considering this, the aim of this paper is to explore the concept of life as a non-essentialist natural kind. It is intended to highlight that complex scientific concepts are better understood from points of view that are not constrained by the rigid frameworks of essentialism and the realism/conventionalism dichotomy. Keywords: natural kind, definition of life, essentialism, operational definitions.
REFERENCIAL SEMANTICS AND THE MEANING OF NATURAL KIND TERMS
2009
Neste artigo, tomei certas idéias da semântica de Montague como meu ponto de partida e distingui claramente semântica de epistemologia. O significado de uma sentença é considerado como suas condições de verdade as quais são assumidas como sendo estabelecidas por dois componentes: a estrutura sintática e os referentes de termos sem estrutura. Nesse panorama teórico, tento apresentar uma explicação para o significado dos termos de espécies naturais. Minha tese é que o significado de um termo de espécie natural é sua referência, i. e., a espécie natural à qual o termo refere-se.