[1] John Dewey held a view that belief in unconditional natural kinds is a mistake, a relic of obsolete scientific practices.
Hasok Chang and Rasmus Winther hold the emerging view that natural kinds are useful and evolving scientific facts.
Dewey argued that modern scientists do not follow Aristotle in treating inductive and deductive propositions as facts already known about nature's stable structure.
Aristotle's generic and universal propositions have become conceptual tools of inquiry warranted by inductive inclusion and exclusion of traits.
Generic existential data thus identified are reformulated—stated abstractly as if-then universal relations capable of serving as answers or solutions: If
By the early 1800s the curious absence of rain before dew and the growth of understanding led scientists to examine new traits.
"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.
In 1969, Willard Van Orman Quine brought the term "natural kind" into contemporary analytic philosophy with an essay bearing that title.
Finally, it suggested that human psychological structure can explain the illogical success of induction: "an innate flair that we have for natural kinds".
[4]: 41 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."
"[4]: 42 Quine posited an intuitive human capacity to recognize criteria for judging degrees of similarity among objects, an "innate flair for natural kinds”.
In 1975, Hilary Putnam rejected descriptivist ideas about natural kind by elaborating on semantic concepts in language.
[7] In 1993, Hilary Kornblith published a review of debates about natural kinds since Quine had launched that epistemological project a quarter-century earlier.
[3]: 1 He found still acceptable Quine's original assumption that discovering knowledge of mind-independent reality depends on inductive generalisations based on limited observations, despite its being illogical.
Equally acceptable was Quine's further assumption that instrumental success of inductive reasoning confirms both the existence of natural kinds and the legitimacy of the method.
Quine's assumption of an innate human psychological process—"standard of similarity," "subjective spacing of qualities"—also remained unquestioned.
95 "To my mind, the primary case to be made for the view that our [universal] psychological processes dovetail with the [generic] causal structure of the world comes ... from the success of science.
Kornblith didn't explain how tedious modern induction accurately generalizes from a few generic traits to all of some universal kind.
Hasok Chang and Rasmus Winther contributed essays to a collection entitled Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice, published in 2016.
The editor of the collection, Catherine Kendig, argued for a modern meaning of natural kinds, rejecting Aristotelian classifications of objects according to their "essences, laws, sameness relations, fundamental properties ... and how these map out the ontological space of the world."
"[8]: 42–3 For Chang, induction creates conditionally warranted kinds by "epistemic iteration"—refining classifications developmentally to reveal how constant conjunctions of relevant traits work: "fundamental classificatory concepts become refined and corrected through our practical scientific engagement with nature.
"Attempts to establish and explain the combining-weight regularities led to the development of the chemical atomic theory by John Dalton and others.
"[8]: 38–9 Chang claimed his examples of classification practices in chemistry confirmed the fallacy of the traditional assumption that natural kinds exist as mind-independent reality.
"Much natural-kind talk has been driven by an intuitive metaphysical essentialism that concerns itself with an objective [generic] order of nature whose [universal] knowledge could, ironically, only be obtained by a supernatural being.
"[8]: 202–3 Winther identified "inferential processes of abstraction and generalization" as methods used by GIS, and explained how they generate digital maps.
"Quine holds that kinds are "functionally relevant groupings in nature" whose recognition permits our inductions to "tend to come out right."
That is, kinds ground fallible inductive inferences and predictions, so essential to scientific projects including those of GIS and cartography.
Instead, Dewey presents an analysis of kinds (and classes and universals) as fallible and context-specific hypotheses permitting us to address problematic situations effectively.
"[8]: 208 Winther concludes that classification practices used in Geographic Information Science are able to harmonize these conflicting philosophical perspectives on natural kinds.