The inferentialist view of natural kinds

Abstract

Abstract This chapter begins to unpack the view of Natural Kinds with a Human Face (NKHF). Chapter 6 placed phenomena rather than properties centre-stage, while Chapter 7 gave the reasons for introducing a more liberal account of natural kinds that can shed light on engineered kinds, empty kinds, kinds in-the-making, and ultimately treat all bona fide natural kinds as evolving kinds. This chapter begins to lay out an inferentialist view of natural kinds that is akin to Neurath’s Boat in being anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist. Section 8.2 clarifies the Neurathian spirit of the strategy and locates it in the wider context of the rise of inferentialism in philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and philosophy more generally. Section 8.3 discusses the naturalism inherent in this approach to natural kinds: historical naturalism. Section 8.4 illustrates it with an example from ethnobotany, which shed light on the ability of a plurality of situated epistemic communities to historically identify groupings of modally robust phenomena and to fine-grain or coarse-grain associated descriptions of natural kinds in a perspectivalist and thoroughgoingly anti-foundationalist way. Finally, Section 8.4 elucidates some of the details in this inferentialist story, namely how phenomena display (causal or non-causal) lawlike dependencies among relevant features, and how epistemic communities with their respective situated knowledges learn over time to rely on these lawlike dependencies in order to distinguish between in-the-making kinds that are in fact empty kinds and those that instead become evolving kinds.