Natural Categories and Human Kinds

Natural Categories and Human Kinds PDF Author: Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107244595
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences.

Natural Categories and Human Kinds

Natural Categories and Human Kinds PDF Author: Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107244595
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences.

Natural Categories and Human Kinds

Natural Categories and Human Kinds PDF Author: Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107012740
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Muhammad Ali Khalidi proposes a new approach to classifications in the natural and social sciences, avoiding essentialism and social constructionism.

Natural Categories and Human Kinds

Natural Categories and Human Kinds PDF Author: Muhammad Ali Khalidi (Professor of philosophy)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781139888462
Category : Categories (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Muhammad Ali Khalidi proposes a new approach to classifications in the natural and social sciences, avoiding essentialism and social constructionism.

Language, Interaction and Social Cognition

Language, Interaction and Social Cognition PDF Author: G. R. Semin
Publisher: Sage Publications (CA)
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The importance of language is increasingly acknowledged within social psychology. In this seminal book, a group of distinguished authors goes beyond general theory to address, from a research base, key issues in the interrelationship between language, interaction and social cognition. Their starting point is that the ways in which we perceive and, therefore, interact with others are structured by the language available to us, as a socially constructed system above and beyond individual minds. The relationship between language and social cognition is not, however, a fixed or unicausal one: linguistic terms are also generated in response to social and cultural development. The interplay is dialectical - a dialectic of the social. The authors explore this dialectic through such themes as: the use and power of category labels; trait-behaviour relations in social information processing; and interpersonal verbs and attribution. They examine the significance of language use in the persistence of stereotypes, and the links between syntactical reasoning processes and social cognition, as well as the impact of perspectivity. They consider the ways in which communication roles and context shape, and are shaped by, language. Language, Interaction and Social Cognition will be essential reading for all those in social psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics and communication studies concerned with the role of language in interaction and social cognition.

Social Construction of Law

Social Construction of Law PDF Author: Michael Giudice
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1839103221
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This illuminating book explores the theme of social constructionism in legal theory. It questions just how much freedom and power social groups really have to construct and reconstruct law.

Before Nature

Before Nature PDF Author: Francesca Rochberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675958X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it. Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.

Metamodernism

Metamodernism PDF Author: Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022678665X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Opening -- Part I. Metarealism. How the real world became a fable, or, The realities of social construction -- Part II. Process social ontology. Concepts in disintegration & strategies for demolition ; Process social ontology ; Social kinds -- Part III. Hylosemiotics. Hylosemiotics : the discourse of things -- Part IV. Knowledge and value. Zetetic knowledge ; The revaluation of values -- Conclusion : becoming metamodern.

History and the Study of Religion

History and the Study of Religion PDF Author: Stanley Kent Stowers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197775675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
What is religion? How is religion constituted as a social entity? Is religion a useful category for historians, anthropologists, and sociologists? In History and the Study of Religion Stanley Stowers addresses these questions and discusses examples from ancient Greek, Roman, Judean and especially early Christian religion to illustrate a theory of religion as a social kind. He explains how ancient Mediterranean religion consisted of four sub-kinds: the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion, the religion of literate and literary experts, and the religion of literate experts with political power. Through these categories he shows how Christianity arose and succeeded.

Emotions, Qualia, And Consciousness

Emotions, Qualia, And Consciousness PDF Author: Alfred Kaszniak
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814493872
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description
The experience of emotion is a ubiquitous component of the stream of consciousness; emotional qualia interact with other contents and processes of consciousness in complex ways. Recent research has supported the hypothesis that important functional aspects of emotion can operate outside the conscious awareness. Primary types of emotions are found in animals, while secondary, more complex types are involved in interpersonal relationships. Emotions both influence genetic repair mechanisms of individuals and are responsible for group behavior. Many scholars and scientists believe that no scientific or philosophic account of consciousness can be complete without an understanding of the role of emotion.

The Construction of Human Kinds

The Construction of Human Kinds PDF Author: Ron Mallon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019107229X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. Social constructionist explanations of human kinds like race, gender, and homosexuality are commonplace in the social sciences and humanities, but what do they mean and what are their implications? This book synthesizes recent work in evolutionary, cognitive, and social psychology as well as social theory and the philosophy of science, in order to offer a naturalistic account of the social construction of human kinds. Mallon begins by qualifying social constructionist accounts of representations of human kinds by appealing to evidence suggesting canalized dispositions towards certain ways of representing human groups, using race as a case study. He then turns to interpret constructionist accounts of categories as attempts to explain causally powerful human kinds by appealling to our practices of representing them, and he articulates a view in which widespread representations produce entrenched social roles that could vindicate such attempts. Mallon goes on to explore constructionist concerns with the social consequences of our representations, focusing especially on the way human kind representations can alter our behaviour and undermine our self understandings and our agency. Mallon understands socially constructed kinds as the real, sometimes stable products of our cognitive and representational practices, and he suggests that reference to such kinds can figure in our everyday and scientific practices of representing the social world. The result is a realistic, naturalistic account of how human representations might contribute to making up the parts of the social world that they represent.