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Amorphic kinds: Cluster’s last stand?

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Abstract

I raise a puzzle case for “cluster” accounts of natural kinds—the homeostatic property cluster and stable property cluster accounts, especially—on the basis of their expected treatment of the metaphysics of certain disease kinds. Some kinds, I argue, fail to exhibit the co-instantiated property clusters these cluster views take to be (partly) constitutive of natural kinds. Some genetic diseases, for example, have archetypical instances with few or none of the pathological processes or symptoms associated with the kind: their instances are typified by a single dispositional property. I dub such kinds ‘amorphic’, owing to their limited morphology, and try out a number of ways in which these kinds might be treated in terms of property clusters, adapting responses cluster theorists have offered to the problem of polymorphic species. Finding these responses wanting, I conclude that cluster accounts are unlikely to be the best account of the metaphysics of amorphic kinds.

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Notes

  1. What I am calling the HPC “family” includes (at least): Boyd (1991, 1999), Kornblith (1993), Griffiths (1999), Magnus (2011), Williams (2011), Wilson et al. (2007), Slater (2015), Chakravartty (2007) and Martínez (2015).

  2. This is actually a case of sexual dimorphism, but it is at the heart of the puzzle case. Species that change dramatically over their lifetimes—such as butterflies—offer further examples, as do polyphenic species, like ants and bees.

  3. Wilson et al. (2007) discuss the many deaths that biology rained down on essentialism.

  4. I say modified because [E] makes reference to the clusters in [C], and so, without modification, not satisfying [C] entails not satisfying [E].

  5. Herein we find additional drivers of the are/consist wedge: if one insists that [C] is part of what kinds are, and not just in what they consist, it follows that if PKU is not a cluster kind, then it’s not a natural kind either.

  6. No event can be the cause of itself. Hence, if the symptoms are part of the disease, then it cannot be the disease that causes them. An early part of a process can explain a later part, but treating the symptoms as part of the disease would rule out this sort of splitting.

  7. Some diseases are dispositional states, but not all. In fact, I deny that there is a single ontological category to which diseases belong.

  8. A recent study by Murphy et al. (2008) suggests that the UK has far fewer incidents of untreated PKU than sheer frequency of the disease predicts. The disease impacts roughly 1 in 10,000 people, but it is thought that only 150 current cases have advanced without treatment. Most US states make screening for PKU a standard part of newborn testing, leading to similarly low numbers of advanced cases.

  9. That amorphic kinds are identified by a single property means that the roles these kinds play in their respective sciences cannot be quite the same as that of the cluster kinds, but that should not force us into an ad hoc conclusion regarding the possibility of single-property clusters. I briefly revisit this matter in the conclusion.

  10. What I am proposing is a minimalist form of essentialism, suited—if it is—to answering the consist question regarding amorphic kinds. It therefore does not carry with it all of the potentially negative aspects we associate with the (traditional) essentialism of Aristotle, Kripke, or Putnam. To wit, the present essentialism does not require kinds to fall into a single, unified, hierarchical, monistic system.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to all those who helped improve this paper: the audience in Madrid; the journal referees; D Limbaugh; and J Beverley.

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  1. University at Buffalo, 135 Park Hall UB North Campus, Buffalo, NY, 14260, USA

    Neil E. Williams

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Correspondence to Neil E. Williams.

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Williams, N.E. Amorphic kinds: Cluster’s last stand?. Biol Philos 33, 14 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9625-3

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