In the philosophy of science and some other branches of philosophy, a "natural kind" is an intellectual grouping, or categorizing of things, that is reflective of the actual world and not just human interests. Some treat it as a classification identifying some structure of truth and reality that exists whether or not humans recognize it. Others treat it as intrinsically useful to the human mind, but not necessarily reflective of something more objective. Candidate examples of natural kinds are found in all the sciences, but the field of chemistry provides the paradigm example of elements. Alexander Bird and Emma Tobin see natural kinds as relevant to metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language, as well as the philosophy of science.
John Dewey held a view that belief in unconditional natural kinds is a mistake, a relic of obsolete scientific practices. Hilary Putnam rejects descriptivist approaches to natural kinds with semantic reasoning. Richard Boyd holds that many natural kinds are homeostatic property clusters, families of properties whose co-occurrence is maintained by causal mechanisms. Hasok Chang and Rasmus Winther hold the emerging view that natural kinds are useful and evolving scientific facts.
John Dewey In 1938, John Dewey published Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, where he explained how modern scientists create kinds through induction and deduction, and why they have no use for natural kinds. The philosophical issue is how humans can dependably predict that unobserved examples of a kind will have the same traits as a few observed examples. The traditional answer grew out of Aristotle's assertion that humans describe things they know in two kinds of propositions. Existential kinds—known by observing traits—are stated in "generic" propositions. Conceptual kinds—known by intuitive recognition of groups of traits—are stated in "universal" propositions.
Dewey argued that modern scientists do not follow Aristotle in treating inductive and deductive propositions as facts already known about nature's stable structure. Today, scientific propositions are intermediate steps in inquiry, hypotheses about processes displaying stable patterns. Aristotle's generic and universal propositions have become conceptual tools of inquiry warranted by inductive inclusion and exclusion of traits. They are provisional means rather than results of inquiry revealing the structure of reality. Propositions as such are ... provisional, intermediate and instrumental. Since their subject-matter concerns two kinds of means, material and procedural, they are of two main categories: (1) Existential [generic means, known by induction], referring directly to actual conditions, as determined by experimental observation, and (2) ideational or conceptual [universal means, known by deduction], consisting of interrelated meanings, which are non-existential in content ... but which are applicable to existence through the operations they represent as possibilities.
Modern induction starts with a question to be answered or a problem to be solved. It identifies problematic subject-matter and seeks potentially relevant traits and conditions. Generic existential data thus identified are reformulated—stated abstractly as if-then universal relations capable of serving as answers or solutions: If , then water. For Dewey, induction creates warranted kinds by observing constant conjunction of relevant traits.
No grounded generic propositions can be formed save as they are the products of the performance of operations indicated as possible by universal propositions. The problem of inference is, accordingly, to discriminate and conjoin those qualities [kinds] of existential material that serve as distinguishing traits (inclusively and exclusively) of a determinate kind.
Dewey used the example of "morning dew" to describe these abstract steps creating scientific kinds. From antiquity, the common-sense belief had been that all dew is a kind of rain, meaning dew drops fall. By the early 1800s the curious absence of rain before dew and the growth of understanding led scientists to examine new traits. Functional processes changing bodies [kinds] from solid to liquid to gas at different temperatures, and operational constants of conduction and radiation, led to new inductive hypotheses "directly suggested by this subject-matter, not by any data [kinds] previously observable. ... There were certain [existential] conditions postulated in the content of the new [non-existential] conception about dew, and it had to be determined whether these conditions were satisfied in the observable facts of the case."
After demonstrating that dew could be formed by these generic existential phenomena, and not by other phenomena, the universal hypothesis arose that dew forms following established laws of temperature and pressure. "The outstanding conclusion is that inductive procedures are those which prepare existential material so that it has convincing evidential weight with respect to an inferred generalization. Existential data are not pre-known natural kinds, but become conceptual statements of "natural" processes. Objects and qualities [kinds] as they naturally present themselves or as they are "given," are not only not the data of science but constitute the most direct and important obstacles to formation of those ideas and hypotheses that are genuinely relevant and effective. We are brought to the conclusion that it is modes of active response which are the ground of generality of logical form, not the existential immediate qualities of that which is responded to.
Dewey concluded that nature is not a collection of natural kinds, but rather of reliable processes discoverable by competent induction and deduction. He replaced the ambiguous label "natural kind" with "warranted assertion" to emphasize the conditional nature of all human knowings. Assuming kinds to be given unconditional knowings leads to the error of assuming that conceptual universal propositions can serve as evidence for generic propositions; observed consequences affirm unobservable imagined causes. "For an 'inference' that is not grounded in the evidential nature of the material from which it is drawn is not an inference. It is a more or less wild guess." Modern induction is not a guess about natural kinds, but a means to create instrumental understanding.
Willard Van Orman Quine In 1969, Willard Van Orman Quine brought the term "natural kind" into contemporary analytic philosophy with an essay bearing that title. His opening paragraph laid out his approach in three parts. First, it questioned the logical and scientific legitimacy of reasoning inductively by counting a few examples posting traits imputed to all members of a kind: "What tends to confirm an induction?" For Quine, induction reveals warranted kinds by repeated observation of visible similarities. Second, it assumed that color can be a characteristic trait of natural kinds, despite some logical puzzles: hypothetical colored kinds such as non-black non-ravens and green-blue emeralds. Finally, it suggested that human psychological structure can explain the illogical success of induction: "an innate flair that we have for natural kinds".
He started with the logical hypothesis that, if all ravens are black—an observable natural kind—then non-black non-ravens are equally a natural kind: "... each [observed] black raven tends to confirm the law [universal proposition] that all ravens are black ..." Observing shared generic traits warrants the inductive universal prediction that future experience will confirm the sharing: "And every reasonable [universal] expectation depends on resemblance of [generic] circumstances, together with our tendency to expect similar causes to have similar effects." "The notion of a kind and the notion of similarity or resemblance seem to be variants or adaptations of a single [universal] notion. Similarity is immediately definable in terms of kind; for things are similar when they are two of a kind."
Quine posited an intuitive human capacity to recognize criteria for judging degrees of similarity among objects, an "innate flair for natural kinds”. These criteria work instrumentally when applied inductively: "... why does our innate subjective spacing [classification] of [existential] qualities accord so well with the functionally relevant [universal] groupings in nature as to make our inductions tend to come out right?"
He admitted that generalizing after observing a few similarities is scientifically and logically unjustified. The numbers and degrees of similarities and differences humans experience are infinite. But the method is justified by its instrumental success in revealing natural kinds. The "problem of induction" is how humans "should stand better than random or coin-tossing chances of coming out right when we predict by inductions which are based on our innate, scientifically unjustified similarity standards." A standard of similarity is in some sense innate. This point is not against empiricism; it is a commonplace of behavioral psychology. A response to a red circle, if it is rewarded, will be elicited by a pink eclipse more readily than by a blue triangle; the red circle resembles the pink ellipse more than the blue triangle. Without some such prior spacing of qualities, we could never acquire a [classification] habit; all stimuli would be equally alike and equally different.
Quine credited human ability to recognize colors as natural kinds to the evolutionary function of color in human survival—distinguishing safe from poisonous kinds of food. He recognized that modern science often judges color similarities to be superficial, but denied that equating existential similarities with abstract universal similarities makes natural kinds any less permanent and important. The human brain's capacity to recognize abstract kinds joins the brain's capacity to recognize existential similarities. Credit is due to man's inveterate ingenuity, or human sapience, for having worked around the blinding dazzle of color vision and found the more significant regularities elsewhere. Evidently natural selection has dealt with the conflict [between visible and invisible similarities] by endowing man doubly: with both a color-slanted quality space and the ingenuity to rise above it. He has risen above it by developing modified systems of kinds, hence modified similarity standards for scientific purposes. By the [inductive] trial-and-error process of theorizing he has regrouped things into new kinds which prove to lend themselves to many inductions better than the old. A man's judgments of similarity do and should depend on his theory [universal propositions], on his beliefs; but similarity itself, what the man's judgments purport to be judgments of, [is] an objective relation in the world. It belongs in the [generic] subject matter not of our [universal] theory ... about the world, but of our [universal] theory of the [generic] world itself. Such would be the acceptable and reputable sort of similarity concept, if it could be defined.
Quine argued that the success of innate and learned criteria for classifying kinds on the basis of similarities observed in small samples of kinds, constitutes evidence of the existence of natural kinds; observed consequences affirm imagined causes. His reasoning continues to provoke philosophical debates.
Hilary Putnam