Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
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What is the main focus of Khalidi’s book on natural and human kinds?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we interview philosophers about their new books in a wide variety of areas, including ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and many more. Today's interview is with Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at York University. We're talking about his new book, Natural Categories and Humankinds, which is just out from Cambridge University Press.
The division between natural kinds, the kinds that cut nature at its joints, and those that simply reflect human interests and values, has a long history. The natural kinds are often thought to have certain essential characteristics that are fixed by nature, such as a particular atomic number, while other kinds, of which a commonly cited example is race, are contentious precisely because they appear to group things, in this case people, by features that reflect social mores and not real essences. That natural versus socially constructed difference, of course, depends on what an essence is, as well as whether having an essence is the mark of a natural kind. In his new book, Khalidi argues for what he calls an epistemic view of natural kinds, in which they are the kinds that correspond to our best scientific categories and satisfy various epistemic virtues.
On his view, natural kinds do not have essences, often have fuzzy boundaries, can satisfy the relevant epistemic virtues to differing degrees, and can be mind-dependent in a way that does not impugn their objectivity. The result is a challenging view of natural kinds that avoids problems associated with essentialist views, but also widens the scope of what may be a natural kind to include potentially many of those often considered to be socially constructed. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Professor Khalidi.
Hi, thanks very much for having me on your podcast.
Yeah, I'm very excited to hear about your new book, Natural Categories and Humankind.
How did Khalidi’s background in physics and philosophy lead him to write this book?
I wanted to start with... the basic background question of, you know, how you came to write this book about, about natural kinds, why you got interested in this topic and, and perhaps, you know, it's, it's place, it's role in your, your larger philosophical project and philosophical interests.
Yeah. Well, I guess like many philosophers, I came to philosophy from science. I started out by studying physics at university, but I, I think I always had certain philosophical interests even then. And in fact, even before going to university, I'd been exposed to a little bit of philosophy and I was interested in logic. And so I've always been interested in foundational questions in science, categorization, classification systems, what makes them valid, what makes them legitimate. And eventually, when I went to graduate school and studied philosophy, I also focused on these foundational questions in science. I wrote my dissertation on incommensurability and worked a little bit on reductionism. And I've been thinking about categories and classification off and on really since then.
And I've written a few papers over the years about What philosophers call natural kinds, which is roughly what they mean by that, I think, is what are the categories that are valid or that truly correspond to divisions in nature? So the natural kinds are supposed to be those divisions in nature that really exist. And I was always interested in getting to the bottom of that debate in trying to resolve this question.
What is the “epistemic” view of natural kinds that Khalidi proposes?
And so eventually I thought that I would try to tackle it in book-length form, not just in a series of articles. So that's how I came to write the book.
So you clearly have been thinking, I mean, it comes through very clearly that you've been thinking about these things from a variety of angles for a long time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main focus of Khalidi’s book on natural and human kinds?
0:04–2:30
2
How did Khalidi’s background in physics and philosophy lead him to write this book?
2:30–4:25
3
What is the “epistemic” view of natural kinds that Khalidi proposes?
4:25–5:58
4
Why does Khalidi reject essentialist criteria for natural kinds?
5:58–7:44
5
How do fuzzy boundaries in the periodic table (e.g., lithium isotopes) illustrate his view?
7:44–9:54
6
What is the difference between revisability of categories and mutability of kinds?
9:54–12:21
7
Why does Khalidi argue that mind‑dependence is not a decisive test for natural kinds?
12:21–14:16
8
How does Khalidi apply his framework to socially contested categories like race?
14:16–1:05:32
Speakers
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