Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on Kripke’s and Putnam’s considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz’s arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too (and, arguably, for common nouns in general), or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary.

Kind terms and semantic uniformity / Bianchi, Andrea. - In: PHILOSOPHIA. - ISSN 0048-3893. - 50:1(2022), pp. 7-17. [10.1007/s11406-021-00433-4]

Kind terms and semantic uniformity

Bianchi Andrea
2022-01-01

Abstract

Since Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s groundbreaking work in the Seventies, the idea has emerged that natural kind terms are semantically special among common nouns. Stephen P. Schwartz, for example, has argued that an artifactual kind term like “pencil” functions very differently from a natural kind term like “tiger.” This, however, blatantly violates a principle that I call Semantic Uniformity. In this paper, I defend the principle. In particular, I outline a picture of how natural kind terms function based on Kripke’s and Putnam’s considerations, and I use it to rebut Schwartz’s arguments, showing that if it works for natural kind terms, it can work for artifactual kind terms too (and, arguably, for common nouns in general), or at least that Schwartz did not provide good enough reasons to the contrary.
2022
Kind terms and semantic uniformity / Bianchi, Andrea. - In: PHILOSOPHIA. - ISSN 0048-3893. - 50:1(2022), pp. 7-17. [10.1007/s11406-021-00433-4]
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11381/2904797
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