Topic summary
Natural kinds
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Natural kind.
Hasok Chang and Rasmus Winther
Hasok Chang and Rasmus Winther contributed essays to a collection entitled Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice, published in 2016. The editor of the collection, Catherine Kendig, argued for a modern meaning of natural kinds, rejecting Aristotelian classifications of objects according to their "essences, laws, sameness relations, fundamental properties ... and how these map out the ontological space of the world." She thus dropped the traditional supposition that natural kinds exist permanently and independently of human reasoning. She collected original works examining results of discipline-specific classifications of kinds: "the empirical use of natural kinds and what I dub 'activities of natural kinding' and 'natural kinding practices'." Her natural kinds include scientific disciplines themselves, each with its own methods of inquiry and classifications or taxonomies..