Collecting and Dividing : on the diversity of particulars and the framing of kinds

Abstract

To argue that the writing of philosophy involves telling stories, deploying figures of speech, and making pictures, is likely to be resisted perhaps fiercely, because such an approach appears at odds with the tenets of a rational, analytical method. Where the subject of these stories, tropes, and pictures is the natural world such resistance arises from a confusion of the fictional with the false, the imagined with the imaginary, and of making things out with making them up. The subject of this thesis is the presumed kind structure of the world, and I argue that in our descriptions of the world we create fictions, imagine relations, and make out patterns shaped by our particular interests. 'Argue' may be the wrong word, mainly I point, for like an aerial perspective once a thing is seen it cannot be unseen.1 I intend to provide such a perspective with respect to kinds. I resist the idea that reality, the world, possesses an idiom in which it prefers to be described, indeed demands that description if we are to get it right. I am not an essentialist. We may and do describe the world according to our own lights. While a rose is a rose, fact is not lost if we accept our talk about it may not be entirely literal, for instance when we frame it in a classification. Where our talk is that of science we may pursue various styles of thought, or reasoning, and these, often not literal, will create and shape kinds. That idea is Ian Hacking's, and I follow it here. Additionally, and again following Hacking, while my inclinations are nominalist, I have an enthusiasm for kinds. I defend their diversity and celebrate their Whiggishness with respect to our treatment of them. My task in this thesis is to illustrate that treatment in historical and contemporary contexts, and to demonstrate the diversity of kinds is in part a consequence of the history and the contexts. Like Dante entering the Inferno I needed a guide, my Virgil is Hacking, W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty are present as torchbearers. 1 With thanks to Clifford Geetz for this and other stylistic images in this abstract.