Realism and Human Kinds

Abstract

It is often noted that institutio~l objects and artifacts depend on human beliefs and intentions and so fail to meet the realist paradigm of mind-independent objects. In this paper I draw out exactly in what ways the thesis of mind-independence fails, and show that it has some surprising consequences. For the specific forms of mind-dependence involved entail that we have certain forms of epistemic privilege with regard to our own institutional and artifactual kinds, protecting us from certain possibilities of ignorance and error; they also demonstrate that not all cases of reference to these kinds can proceed along a purely causal model. As a result, realist views in ontology, epistemology, and semantics that were developed with natural scientific kinds in mind cannot fully apply to the kinds of the social and human sciences. In closing I consider some wider consequences of these results for social science and philosophy. REALISM AND HUMAN KINDS 58 1 Many thanks to

Dual Content Semantics, privative adjectives, and dynamic compositionality

“…However, one could argue that the reasons to reject the idea that definitions determine the extension of lexical terms do not apply to the case of artifacts. Indeed, some linguists and philosophers have argued that, in general, artifact kinds can be defined in terms of their functional and/or genealogical properties (Thomasson 2003). If this is correct, it might seem reasonable to incorporate the telic or agentive of artifact terms into their E-structure.…”

“…(Thomasson 2003) A consequence of this constitutive condition is that "reference to artifactual kinds. .…”

“…37 For example, Thomasson (2003Thomasson ( , 2007 argues that the essence of artifacts lies in the intentions of their makers:…”

Artifact Categorization. Trends and Problems

“…Gelman 1988;Bloom 1998;Gelman and Bloom 2000;Malt and Sloman 2007a, b;Kelemen & Carey 2007) and philosophers (e.g. Baker 2007;Dipert 1993;Dennett 1990;Elder 2004;Hilpinen 1992Hilpinen , 1993Houkes and Vermaas 2010;Preston 2012;Thomasson 2003Thomasson , 2007Vaesen and van Amerongen 2008;Wiggins 1980Wiggins , 2001. For and introduction see Margolis and Laurence 2007;Houkes and Vermaas 2009;Thomasson 2009;Verbeek, and Vermaas 2009).…”

“…A champion of this position is Thomasson (2003Thomasson ( , 2006Thomasson ( , 2007. In her opinion, there are two different conditions that objects of a kind K should satisfy to be considered as belonging to a real kind.…”