Natural kinds as categorical bottlenecks

Abstract

Both realist and anti-realist accounts of natural kinds possess prima facie virtues: realists can straightforwardly make sense of the apparent objectivity of the natural kinds, and anti-realists, their knowability. This paper formulates a properly anti-realist account designed to capture both merits. In particular, it recommends understanding natural kinds as 'categorical bottlenecks,' those categories that not only best serve us, with our idiosyncratic aims and cognitive capacities, but also those of a wide range of alternative agents. By endorsing an ultimately subjective categorical principle, this view sidesteps epistemological difficulties facing realist views. Yet, partly in consequence of the ubiquity of robust processes in our universe, it nevertheless identifies natural kinds that are fairly, though not completely, stance-independent or objective.

Indigenous and Scientific Kinds

“…If a SPC satisfies this additional epistemic criterion, I will call it a "bottleneck SPC." The notion of a bottleneck follows Franklin-Hall's [2014] recent suggestion that we should understand natural kinds as "categorical bottlenecks" that "not only best serve us, with our idiosyncratic aims and cognitive capacities, but also those of a wide range of alternative agents. "…”

“…Arguably this is not only because we somehow have to define the required range that is "ultimately relative to us" (Franklin-Hall [2014]) but also because positions in the epistemic agent space are arguably relative to our priorities. Franklin-Hall appeals to an intuitively grasped structure and suggests that we see "immediately that an inquirer aiming only to elucidate patterns in the relative speed of animal locomotion is further from us than one with all of our aims, except disregarding the behavior of wombats."…”

“…I argue that ethnobiological accounts of taxonomic convergence-divergence patters challenge common philosophical models of the relation between folk concepts and natural kinds. Section 5 suggests that an adequate model of convergence-divergence patterns requires an extension of this model through a concept of domain-transcending SPCs and "categorical bottlenecks" in the sense of Franklin-Hall [2014]. Section 6 evaluates the relevance of these findings for contemporary debates about natural kinds.…”

Ethnoontology: Ways of world‐building across cultures

“…If this is true, then purely natural kinds may not be a default way of dividing up the world, but a relative rarity confined to contexts of highly regimented and self-conscious inquiry such as the sciences themselves. Ethnoontological research provides important resources to move beyond a simple divide between "natural" and "conventional" kinds (Ludwig, 2018a) towards empirically informed discussions about kinds that exhibit different degrees of causal unification (e.g., Khalidi, 2013) and are suitable for different epistemic purposes (e.g., Franklin-Hall, 2015).…”

Whales, fish and Alaskan bears: interest-relative taxonomy and kind pluralism in biology

“…This structure is then invoked in order to explain what makes certain explanatory and predictive practices in science highly successful (Magnus 2012, pp. 48-50;Boyd 1999, p. 68;Slater 2015;Franklin-Hall 2015). The core claim of any theory of natural kinds is that there are certain categories that are especially useful for scientific prediction and explanation, and that these categories refer to kinds that have a certain common structure (this common structure is spelled out differently by different theories, of course).…”