โ Scribed by Michael J. Loux
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The concept of a kind plays a prominent role in the metaphysics associated with the Aristoteliau tradition; and at an intuitive level, what Aristotelians have meant by a kind is clear enough. Kinds are universals like man, animal, number, and color which provide us with a system for classifying objects according to what they are. 1 But while helpful as a starting point, this characterization hardly exhausts the subject of kinds. It isolates a certain classificatory role, but it does not provide us with any criteria for identifying universals which play that role. Now, I am convinced that the Aristotelian notion of a kind is a powerful tool for dealing with the problems of metaphysics; but I am also convinced that in the absence of any clear-cut criteria for applying the concept, the metaphysician's use of the notion of a kind is bound to be precarious. In this paper, I shall attempt to give substance to the traditional characterization of kinds by providing criteria of the required short. I shall not, however, provide a single set of criteria which cover all kinds. Indeed, I am inclined to think that there are no such general criteria. What I shall do is provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a universal's being a lowest level kind (what Aristotle called an infima species); then, I shall point to a recursive procedure which enables us to extend the account so as to provide, for any given logical level higher than that occupied by lowest level kinds, necessary and sufficient conditions for being a kind of that level. 2
As philosophers have used the term, kinds constitute one sort of universal. They are universals to which objects belong; and in this, they differ from the properties objects are said to possess and the relations into which they are said to enter. The claim that kinds have members suggests that they are to be identified with the mathematician's classes; and the insight that kinds provide a system for classifying objects seems to confirm this hypothesis. On closer examination, however, we see that what
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
In discussions about words and meanings (or objects), and in logical discussions involving terms and their extension, a distinction comes to be made between objects in the world and the signs, symbols, etc. used to denote them. In some philosophical discussions it may not be clear whether what is re