Two Sources of Normativity in Enthusiastic Accounts of Kinds

Publication Date

3-1-2024

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

Volume

75

Issue

1

DOI

10.1086/715149

First Page

127

Last Page

152

Abstract

Recent trends in the debate about natural kinds tend towards increasingly permissive and practice-oriented views. I argue that while these accounts—which I characterize using Boyd’s ([1991]) term ‘enthusiasm’—offer several helpful insights, they often lack the normative force that they want to have; that is, they cannot provide an account of what makes something a good or bad, better or worse, kind for scientific pursuits. I argue that such accounts can regain a minimal sense of normativity in two ways. The first, which has already been widely embraced by theorists, is to index the appropriateness of a scientific kind to the domain within which it is situated. While this is a good solution, it is not clear how it can be applied in interdisciplinary and cross-domain research pursuits, which are increasingly common. The second way of re-gaining normativity—which is especially, but not exclusively, effective for such cross-domain pursuits—is to attend to the stage at which scientific research is occurring.

Department

Philosophy

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS