Journal Article

Kinds, Complexity and Multiple realization

Boyd, Richard

1999

Overview

According to Millikan the theory of natural kinds is essentially concerned with issues of objective projectibility. [...]I do not intend to always explain the possibility of imperfect homeostasis by appealing to spatio-temporal variability in underlying HPCs. Eternal Kinds and Intrinsic DefinitionsI suspect that one reason Professor Millikan associates HPC kinds with historical kinds both in the sense of kinds necessarily limited to an historical region and in the sense of kinds defined in the first instance by historical relations between members is that she contrasts eternal natural kinds, defined by central intrinsic properties, say from an inner structure common to all members of the kind, with historical kinds in the senses just mentioned, apparently taking this classificatory scheme to be exhaustive. Since biological species and lots of other HPC kinds are defined partly by extrinsic properties, they will all then appear to be historical in both senses.If by an eternal natural kind one means a natural kind which is historical in neither of the senses just mentioned, then many meteorological kinds and perhaps some astronomical kinds as well may turn out to be partly extrinsically defined but still eternal kinds. [...]this is important it is because these processes operate in ping pong balls (and, thus, because they exhibit the associated levels of multiple realizability) that they have the stable macroscopic properties (like shape and coefficient of restitution) which makes them fall under the non-accidental generalizations of Newtonian mechanics.

• Publisher: Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Constructivism / Evolutionary biology / Homeostasis / Ontology / Philosophy / Realism