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    Scientific explanations of inductive projectibility and c... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Natural kinds as a concept should be eliminated altogether

    Scientific explanations of inductive projectibility and causal laws systematically depend on kind membership, as Quine and Boyd independently argued.

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    Reasons For

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    • 1.Natural kind categories (gold, water, tigers) carve nature at joints, enabling reliable inductive generalizations across instances.
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    • 2.Causal laws require stable, objective properties; arbitrary classifications cannot ground genuine causal regularities or projectible predicates.
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    • 3.Quine's indeterminacy and Boyd's homeostatic property clusters both explain why some predicates succeed inductively while others systematically fail.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Physics operates successfully with mathematical functions and dispositions, not kind membership; kinds may be explanatory conveniences, not necessities.
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    • 2.The distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' kinds remains philosophically contested; claiming systematic dependence on unclear concepts is premature.
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    • 3.Many successful inductions ignore kind membership entirely (predictive models in ML, statistical regularities without categorical structure).
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    Related

    Causal laws require stable, objective properties; arbitrary classifications cann...Many successful inductions ignore kind membership entirely (predictive models in...Natural kind categories (gold, water, tigers) carve nature at joints, enabling r...Natural kinds as a concept should be eliminated altogether
    +3 moreShow less
    Physics operates successfully with mathematical functions and dispositions, not ...Quine's indeterminacy and Boyd's homeostatic property clusters both explain why ...The distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' kinds remains philosophically...

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