Natural Kinds in Philosophy and in the Life Sciences: Scholastic Twilight or New Dawn?
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THEMATIC ISSUE ARTICLE: NATURAL KINDS: NEW DAWN?
Natural Kinds in Philosophy and in the Life Sciences: Scholastic Twilight or New Dawn? Miles MacLeod • Thomas A. C. Reydon
Received: 29 July 2012 / Accepted: 8 October 2012 / Published online: 22 December 2012 Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research 2012
Abstract This article, which is intended both as a position paper in the philosophical debate on natural kinds and as the guest editorial to this thematic issue, takes up the challenge posed by Ian Hacking in his paper, ‘‘Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight.’’ Whereas a straightforward interpretation of that paper suggests that according to Hacking the concept of natural kinds should be abandoned, both in the philosophy of science and in philosophy more generally, we suggest that an alternative and less fatalistic reading is also possible. We argue that abandoning the concept of natural kinds would be premature, as it still can do important work. Our concern is with the situation in the (philosophy of the) life sciences. Against the background of this concern we attempt to set something of an agenda for future research on the topic of natural kinds in the (philosophy of the) life sciences. Keywords Classification Ian Hacking Natural kinds Pluralism Scientific kinds
In 2007 Ian Hacking, in a paper entitled ‘‘Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight,’’ pronounced that natural kind talk should be abolished from the philosophy of science as well as from philosophy in general (Hacking 2007a). That paper stands in a line of publications by M. MacLeod College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] T. A. C. Reydon (&) Institut fu¨r Philosophie, Leibniz Universita¨t Hannover, Hannover, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
Hacking on the topic of natural kinds more generally as well as on the concept of kinds in the human and social sciences (e.g., Hacking 1986, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1995, 2002, 2007a, b) and to some extent seems to constitute the pessimistic culmination of that work. From an examination of earlier philosophical work on the concept of natural kinds, as well as the present-day situation in the debate on this topic, Hacking concluded that there no longer exists a unified philosophical project under the name of ‘‘natural kinds.’’ While once there was such a unified line of work, Hacking argued that today we have a ‘‘proliferation of incompatible views’’ and a ‘‘slew of distinct analyses directed at unrelated projects’’ (Hacking 2007a, p. 203). Thus, his conclusion was, it no longer makes sense to talk about natural kinds as if this term identified a distinct, natural subclass of the category of kinds.1 Different authors mean different things when they talk about natural kinds and endorse very different accounts of what it is to be a natural kind, the term ‘‘natural kind’’ appears in very different roles in very different philosophical projects, and the various fields of science employ very different sorts of
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