Natural kind terms again

Two-Dimensionalism and Natural Kind Terms

Kripke and Putnam have convinced most philosophers that we cannot do metaphysics of nature by analysing the senses of natural kind terms – simply because natural kind terms do not have senses. Neo-descriptivists, especially Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, believe that this view is mistaken. Merging classical descriptivism with a Kaplan-inspired two-dimensional framework, neo-descriptivists de...

Refining the Causal Theory of Reference for Natural Kind Terms

Chinese Bare Nouns as Kind - Denoting Terms

This paper addresses an interesting array of facts about Chinese common nouns in some detail. For example, Chinese common nouns, in their bare forms, often stand alone at argument positions, display a variety of context-sensitive interpretations, never combine with numerals without an intervening classifier, and combine with a plurality marker in a highly selective way. It is argued that this w...

Reference and Natural Kind Terms: the Real Essence of Locke’s View

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998) 78–97 0031–5621/98/0100–0000 © 1998 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Abstract: J. L. Mackie’s famous claim that Locke ‘anticipates’ Kripke’s Causal Theory of Reference (CTR) rests, I suggest, upon a pair of im...

Is Emotion a Natural Kind?