A defense of a descriptivist theory of natural kind terms.

摘要

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to defend a descriptivist theory of the semantics of natural kind terms. That defense will be launched via a detailed examination of two issues-- first, an examination of what's right (and what's wrong) with psychological essentialism, a theory of concepts offered up in psychology that some philosophers including Derk Pereboom and Hilary Kornblith have recently taken an interest in. According to Pereboom, psychological essentialism needs to be true for belief/description/conception-based theories of natural kind term concepts to be plausible. I will argue that psychological essentialism does need to be true for descriptivism to be plausible, but not for the reasons that Pereboom gives. I then go on to defend descriptivism from anti-descriptivist arguments that Saul Kripke offers up in Naming and Necessity. I pursue a line of defense against Kripke's arguments that involves actualizing concept-characterizing descriptions. I go on to defend a brand of actualized descriptivism from arguments that Scott Soames launches in Beyond Rigidity. I do so by arguing that the conventions that govern de dicto belief reports are not as straightforward as they are sometimes taken to be.;The above represents the central thesis of the dissertation, but in the course of arguing for it I will engage a number of issues that naturally emerge from launching such a defense, among them, the similarities and differences between Locke's picture of natural kind terms and Putnam's picture of natural kind terms, what essentialism is, what it means for a kind term to be a rigid designator, and why the fact that natural kind terms are rigid designators presents a problem for the descriptivist.