Słowa kluczowe
belief
natural kinds
belief realism
belief anti-realism
objectivity
scientific realism
conventionalism
Abstrakt
DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxix1.03
In the paper, I criticize the contemporary natural-kind approach to the reality of belief. My first argument is intended to show that the framework’s focus on concepts, to the exclusion of theories and practices, conjoined with causal-historical views on the reference of natural-kind terms, has been pushing the debate into irrelevance by stripping it of content. My second argument aims to show that the natural-kind framework offers an illusory sense of tractability. On weak accounts of natural kinds endorsed by Posłajko, the central question of whether belief is a natural kind might be tractable, but these accounts prove too weak to secure the conclusion that natural kinds are real. Strong accounts, by contrast, are descriptively inaccurate. At the end, I suggest that there is also a tradeoff between tractability and validity of the natural-kind framework.
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