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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Relations such as genealogy and interbreeding fail to satisfy the explanatory requirement of essentialism.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Relations such as genealogy and interbreeding fail to explain the traits typically found among the members of a species.
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    • 2.To explain such traits, one must cite the genotype and its developmental environment.
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    • 3.The explanatory requirement states that citing a kind's essence is central in explaining the properties typically associated with members of that kind.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Kripke and Putnam's causal-historical essentialism requires that a kind's essence causally explains its characteristic properties, not merely tracks them historically.
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    • 2.Genealogical and interbreeding relations are historical-relational facts that cannot by themselves causally generate or necessitate any particular phenotypic or genotypic trait.
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    • 3.Therefore, genealogy and interbreeding function as membership criteria, not explanatory essences, failing the causal-explanatory requirement Kripke-Putnam essentialism demands.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Elliott Sober's distinction between 'natural state models' and population thinking shows that species-level relational properties are statistical aggregates, not causally productive universals.
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    • 2.An explanatory essence, as required by the homeostatic property cluster account (Boyd) or traditional essentialism, must be a causally active intrinsic property that sustains the cluster of kind-typical traits.
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    • 3.Interbreeding and genealogy are extrinsic, organism-relative relations that lack the intrinsic causal power necessary to sustain any homeostatic cluster of biological properties.
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