No Grist for Mill on Natural Kinds
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v2i4.35Abstract
According to the standard narrative, natural kind is a technical notion that was introduced by John Stuart Mill in the 1840s and the recent craze for natural kinds, launched by Putnam and Kripke, is a continuation of that tradition. I argue that the standard narrative is mistaken. The Millian tradition of kinds was not particularly influential in the 20th century, and the Putnam-Kripke revolution did not clearly engage with even the remnants that were left of it. The presently active tradition of natural kinds is less than half a century old. Recognizing this might help us better appreciate both Mill and natural kinds.References
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9(18): 474–508, October 1859. A review of Mill’s
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‘essentialism’ at bay in the age of reform. Intellectual History
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Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez
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Published Online December 16 2010.
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Hilary Putnam. Is semantics possible? In Mind, Language, and
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Cambridge University Press, [1970] 1975.
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University Press, New York, 1969.
Carveth Read. On some principles of logic. Mind, 2(7):336–352, July 1877.
Carveth Read. On the theory of logic: An essay. C. Kegan Paul & Co., London, 1878.
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Bertrand Russell. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1948.
Stephen P. Schwartz. Natural kind terms. Cognition, 7:301–315, 1979.
Guy Allan Tawney. J.S. Mill’s theory of inductive logic. University Studies, II.V(1–2), 1909.
M. H. Towry. On the doctrine of natural kinds. Mind, 12(47): 434–438, July 1887.
John Venn. The Logic of Chance. Macmillan and Co., London and Cambridge, 1866.
John Venn. The Logic of Chance. Macmillan and Co., London and Cambridge, second (‘rewritten and greatly enlarged’)
edition, 1876.
John Venn. The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. Macmillan and Co., St. Martin’s Street, London, second edition, 1907.
G.P. Watkins. The relation between kinds of statistical units and the quality of stastical material. The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 26(4):673–702, August 1912.
G.P. Watkins. Statistical units. In Melvin T. Copeland, editor,
Business Statistics, volume III of Harvard Business Studies,
pages 29–52. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1917.
Journal of Philosophy, 78(5):247–272, May 1981.
James Mark Baldwin, editor. Dictionary Of Philosophy And
Psychology, volume 1. The Macmillan Company, New York,
1901.
Alexander Bird and Emma Tobin. Natural kinds.
In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Spring 2009. URL http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/spr2009/entries/natural-kinds/.
C.D. Broad. The relation between induction and probability—(part II). Mind, 29(113):11–45, January 1920.
Anjan Chakravartty. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
John Dupré. Foreword. In Joseph Keim Campell, Michael
O’Rourke, and Matthew H. Slater, editors, Carving nature at
its joints: Natural kinds in metaphysics and science, pages vii–
viii. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011.
F[abian] Franklin and C[hristine] L[add] Franklin. Mill’s natural
kinds. Mind, 13(49):83–85, January 1888.
Ian Hacking. On Boyd. Philosophical Studies, 61:149–154, 1991a.
Ian Hacking. A tradition of natural kinds. Philosophical Studies,
61:109–126, 1991b.
Ian Hacking. Putnam’s theory of natural kinds and their names is not the same as Kripke’s. Principia, 11(1):1–24, 2007a.
Ian Hacking. Natural kinds: Rosy dawn, scholastic twilight. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 82:203–239, 2007b.
Yuri Lin, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jon Orwant, Will Brockman, and Slav Petrov. Syntactic annotations for the Google Books ngram corpus. In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics, pages 169–174, July 8–14 2012. Jeju, Republic of
Korea.
P.D. Magnus. Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: From Planets to Mallards. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2012.
James Martineau. John Stuart Mill. The National Review,
9(18): 474–508, October 1859. A review of Mill’s
Dissertations and Discussions, Political, Philosophical, and
Historical.
Gordon McOuat. The origins of ‘natural kinds’: Keeping
‘essentialism’ at bay in the age of reform. Intellectual History
Review, 19(2):211–230, 2009. doi:
10.1080/17496970902981694.
Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon
Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez
Lieberman Aiden. Quantitative analysis of culture using
millions of digitized books. Science, 331(6014):176–182,
January 14 2011. doi: DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644.
Published Online December 16 2010.
John Stuart Mill. A System of Logic. Harper&Brothers, New York, eighth edition, 1874.
W. H. S. Monck. Mill’s doctrine of natural kinds. Mind, 12(48): 637–640, October 1887.
Hilary Putnam. Is semantics possible? In Mind, Language, and
Reality: Philosophical Papers volume 2, pages 139–152.
Cambridge University Press, [1970] 1975.
W[illard] V[an Orman] Quine. Natural kinds. In Ontological
Relativity & other essays, pages 114–138. Columbia
University Press, New York, 1969.
Carveth Read. On some principles of logic. Mind, 2(7):336–352, July 1877.
Carveth Read. On the theory of logic: An essay. C. Kegan Paul & Co., London, 1878.
Carveth Read. Logic Deductive and Inductive. Alexander Mooring Limited, London, third edition, 1909.
Carveth Read. Logic Deductive and Inductive. Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., London, fourth edition, 1920. URL
http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/4/4/18440/.
Bertrand Russell. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1948.
Stephen P. Schwartz. Natural kind terms. Cognition, 7:301–315, 1979.
Guy Allan Tawney. J.S. Mill’s theory of inductive logic. University Studies, II.V(1–2), 1909.
M. H. Towry. On the doctrine of natural kinds. Mind, 12(47): 434–438, July 1887.
John Venn. The Logic of Chance. Macmillan and Co., London and Cambridge, 1866.
John Venn. The Logic of Chance. Macmillan and Co., London and Cambridge, second (‘rewritten and greatly enlarged’)
edition, 1876.
John Venn. The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic. Macmillan and Co., St. Martin’s Street, London, second edition, 1907.
G.P. Watkins. The relation between kinds of statistical units and the quality of stastical material. The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 26(4):673–702, August 1912.
G.P. Watkins. Statistical units. In Melvin T. Copeland, editor,
Business Statistics, volume III of Harvard Business Studies,
pages 29–52. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1917.
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