That question is distinct from various other metaphysical and linguistic issues that arise in the context of natural kinds and natural kind terms. I am not, at least in the first instance, concerned with the question whether there are any objective divisions among phenomena, where groupings that correspond to such objective divisions form a natural kind while gerrymandered groupings do not. Nor am I concerned with the question whether, assuming that there are natural kinds, the naturalness of natural kinds is a basic feature of the world, or whether that naturalness can be reduced to something else. I will not ask about the connection between natural kinds and essential properties, either, for example, whether it is true that if an object belongs to a natural kind, that is an essential property of that object. Finally, I will not address the semantics of natural kind terms. I will remain silent, for example, on whether descriptivism is true as a metasemantic theory of such terms, and on whether natural kind terms retain a constant meaning or a constant reference across even substantial changes in theory. These are all important questions, but my discussion can hopefully proceed while remaining neutral on all of them. I need to register only one caveat: I will appeal to causation in making theoretical claims. To the extent that such appeals carry commitments on the issues I just mentioned, I won’t remain neutral on them. However, the notion of causation seems sufficiently basic to think that any theory of science has to be compatible with broad appeals to it.
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