Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T10:08:08.147Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Chemical Kind Term Reference and the Discovery of Essence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2009

Joseph LaPorte
Affiliation:
Hope College, Michigan
Get access

Summary

According to the familiar view of scientific inquiry that I have been examining, scientists draw conclusions about the nature of kinds that were named before much science was known. Birds are dinosaurs, scientists have concluded, and water is H2O. These conclusions are supposed to be discoveries about the essences of the bird kind and the water kind. The words ‘bird’, ‘dinosaur’, and ‘water’ are not supposed to have changed in meaning.

I have argued that this account of the conceptual change in question is not right. I have argued that biologists' conclusions, or future conclusions, about the essences of kinds recognized before current systematic theory are in general not discovered to be true. I have focused on kinds from biology, but similar words apply to kinds from chemistry, the other major source of natural-kind terms. My aim in this chapter is to show that.

Much of the motivation for supposing that scientists' conclusions about natural kinds' structures are discoveries about essences comes from Hilary Putnam's famous Twin Earth thought experiment, which concerns a chemical kind: water (Putnam 1975e, pp. 223–27). Twin Earth is a distant planet just like ours except that the waterlike substance on that planet has a long, complicated chemical composition that is abbreviated ‘XYZ’. XYZ looks like water on Earth, tastes like it, comes down in the form of rain, fills rivers, lakes, and oceans, and so on.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×