WHAT ARE THE NATURAL KINDS?

a comparison between the essentialist and functionalist views about natural kinds

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26512/pl.v11i22.42027

Keywords:

Naturalism. Natural kinds. Scientific Methodology. Projectibility. Cluster Homeostatic Property.

Abstract

Naturalism refers to a methodological attitude that seeks to understand phenomena from different human areas from a perspective that takes the natural world as the basic unit of reality. “Natural world”, however, is a very broad expression and whose apparent obviousness can blur some difficult definitions as the definition of what is a natural kind. In this paper, I present two possibilities for understanding natural kinds: The first – essentialist – postulates that natural kinds are objective and independent entities that can be captured by our best scientific studies. The second interpretation – functionalist – assumes that natural kinds are the result of observations and experiments in the natural world, but it recognizes that these kinds are substantially related to categorization and organization exercises carried out within a theory and that makes it successful. Due to its greater malleability, the functionalist theory seems more appropriate to deal with kinds studied in different natural sciences.

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Author Biography

Ísis Esteves Ruffo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Bacharel e Licenciada em Filosofia pela Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei (2016). Mestre em Filosofia pela Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (2020). Atualmente, doutoranda em Filosofia pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Atua, principalmente, nos seguintes temas: metaética, naturalismo ético, realismo moral e semântica dos termos morais. Interesses secundários incluem filosofia da ciência e filosofia da linguagem.

References

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QUINE, Willard Van Orman. Natural Kinds. In: Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press, 1969.

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Published

2022-09-19

How to Cite

Esteves Ruffo, Ísis. (2022). WHAT ARE THE NATURAL KINDS? a comparison between the essentialist and functionalist views about natural kinds. PÓLEMOS – Revista De Estudantes De Filosofia Da Universidade De Brasília, 11(22), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.26512/pl.v11i22.42027

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 22 (2022)

Section

Ensaios

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