Reactive natural kinds and varieties of dependence

Abstract

This paper asks when a natural disease kind is truly ‘reactive’ and when it is merely associated with a corresponding social kind. I begin with a permissive account of real kinds and their structure, distinguishing natural kinds, indifferent kinds and reactive kinds as varieties of real kind characterised by super-explanatory properties. I then situate disease kinds within this framework, arguing that many disease kinds prima facie are both natural and reactive. I proceed to distinguish ‘simple dependence’, ‘secondary dependence’ and ‘essential dependence’ between a natural kind and its classification, and argue that a natural kind is only really reactive, in an important sense, under conditions of essential dependence. On this basis, I offer a principled hypothesis for why psychiatric kinds may be more metaphysically unstable than paradigm somatic disease kinds.

What We Argue about when We Argue about Disease

“…There are exceptions to this rule. For example, some "interactive kinds" are real kinds but may yet change (relatively) quickly (seeCooper 2004;Khalidi 2013;Fagerberg 2022). …”