Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences

by Muhammad Ali Khalidi

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences.

Genres: Philosophy

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is a Palestinian philosopher. He earns his Ph.D., Philosophy, from Columbia University and
M.A., Philosophy, from Columbia University
B.S., Physics, from American University of Beirut.

He is a Presidential Professor of Philosophy at City
University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Before that, he was Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He has also taught at the American University of Beirut, University of Nevada at Reno, and (as a post-doc) at the University of Chicago and Columbia University.


His main areas of research are in the philosophy of science (with an emphasis on cognitive science) and the philosophy of mind. He has been particularly focused on analyzing mental phenomena such as: memory, concepts, and innateness, and what role they play in contemporary cognitive science. He is also interested in scientific classification schemes and in the means of distinguishing artificial categories from real ones in both the natural and social sciences.

Reviews

[Tuomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read many philosophy books from cover to cover anymore, but this was one was a pleasure to read: very clearly written, not too long, and all quite interesting material. Of course, part of the reason is that I've been working on related matters recently and there was extra motivation as I just commented on Khalidi's talk, but in any case I'd say that the book is very accessible and well written. My only real quarrel is the lack of a clear metaphysics of kinds. Khalidi approaches the issue from the epistemic perspective, but he is always clear that the account is realist. It's only towards the end of the book where the "nodes in causal networks" approach is clarified a bit, but then Khalidi does not even attempt to provide a metaphysics of causation or of laws of nature. So, some key questions about the metaphysics of natural kinds remain open.

[Vincenzo Politi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Khalidi successfully revamps the old philosophical debates about the so-called natural kinds. He adopts a moderate middle way between the Scylla of essentialism and the Charybdis of conventionalism, which is also a modified version of Boyd's widely discussed Homeostatic Property Cluster account. Khalidi provides and discusses a number of extremely interesting examples of 'natural kind' from both the natural and the social sciences - so much, that the case studies risk to be more intriguing than the actual philosophical view Khalidi wishes to develop and defend.