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You are listening to the Parts of the Exam and Life Philosophy Podcast, episode 163,

Part 2.

We are talking with Stuart Humphrey.

We had just finished his chapter four of natural kinds in Genesis, where we

were talking about what a continuant is, something that stays the same in some respect,

but changes in other respects, most living beings being an obvious example.

So let's refresh ourselves why we were talking about continuants as a prelude to

talking about natural kinds, which is of course the big topic of the book.

Is it that any natural kind, we have reason to believe that it will be a collection

of continuants, you know, so squirrels and natural kind as opposed to water?

Yeah, I'd like to step back just a little bit first.

There's an agreement among philosophers of science, philosophers more generally,

that if one wishes to discover what a natural kind is or what natural kinds there are,

one should proceed in a naturalistic way.

That would be distinguished from a way that's merely logical or merely conceptual or merely verbal.

And I agree with that.

But it seems to me there are principally two ways of proceeding in a naturalistic manner.

One is to immediately go to what the natural sciences tell us and take as hypotheses,

at least, whatever they say natural kinds are, or natural classes or natural types.

...