Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!ICST-ECF.ARPA!cugini From: cugini@ICST-ECF.ARPA.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Natural kinds Message-ID: <8709220429.AA25735@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Mon, 21-Sep-87 12:31:00 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8709220429.AA25735 Posted: Mon Sep 21 12:31:00 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 23-Sep-87 07:25:49 EDT Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Distribution: world Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 32 Approved: ailist@stripe.sri.com Gilbert Cockton writes: > I'd like to continue the sociological perspective on this debate. > Rule number 1 in sociology is forget about "naturalness" - only > sociobiologists are really into "nature" now, and look at the foul > images of man that they've tried to pass off as science (e.g. Dworkin). This seems a somewhat abrupt dismissal of natural kinds, which has lately attracted some support by people such as Saul Kripke, who is neither a computer scientist, dumb, nor politically unreliable (although he IS a philosopher, and is thereby suspect, no doubt). The (philosophically) serious question is to what extent our shared concepts ("dog", "star", "electron", "chair", "penguin", "integer", "prime number") are merely arbitrary social conventions, and to what extent they reflect objective reality (the old nominalist-realist debate). A sharper re-phrasing of the question might be: To what extent would *any* recognizably rational being share our conceptual framework, given exposure to the same physical environment? (Eg, would Martians have a concept of "star"?). I believe there have been anthropological studies, for instance, showing that Indian classifications of animals and plants line up reasonably well with the conventional Western taxonomy. If there are natural kinds, their relevance to some AI work seems obvious. John Cugini ------