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Etiological Kinds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
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Abstract

Kinds that share historical properties are dubbed “historical kinds” or “etiological kinds,” and they have some distinctive features. I will try to characterize etiological kinds in general terms and briefly survey some previous philosophical discussions of these kinds. Then I will take a closer look at a few case studies involving different types of etiological kinds. Finally, I will try to understand the rationale for classifying on the basis of etiology, putting forward reasons for classifying phenomena on the basis of diachronic features, thereby making a provisional case for considering at least some etiological kinds to be natural kinds.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am very grateful to my coparticipants in a panel on Historical Kinds at the Canadian Philosophical Association annual conference in 2018, Adrian Currie, Marc Ereshefsky, and Laura Franklin-Hall, for their insights and for valuable discussion of these topics. I am also indebted to three anonymous referees for this journal for numerous constructive suggestions that led to many significant improvements.

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