Lecture
LTP Colloquium: "Three Notions of Kind"
- Date
- Thursday 17 September 2026
- Time
- Location
-
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden - Room
- 0.06
The Leiden University Centre Theoretical Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Dr. Tom Ralston, Jacobsen Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and the Department of Philosophy at UCL.
Abstract
The notion of kind is familiar to philosophers, psychologists and linguists. Philosophers say that bears are a natural kind; psychologists say that nominal categories like BEAR are represented as richly structured kinds; linguists say that the bare plural ‘bears’ in the generic sentence ‘Bears hibernate’ denotes a kind. Motivating all three notions is the idea that kind categories have a greater degree of coherence than other categories, which may be completely arbitrary collections of objects. Despite their apparent similarity, however, the theoretical roles played by kinds in these three disciplines are incompatible: no single thing can play all three. Kinds in philosophy are worldly, rather than mental representations of categories. Kinds in psychology are mental, representations of categories. Kinds in linguistics are the worldly referents of generic noun phrases (among other things), yet the notion of a kind required to play this role is much more liberal than anything a philosopher would countenance. I argue that, while linguists have inherited their notion of kind from philosophers and psychologists, this notion is too far removed from those disciplines and should not be used as an unanalysed primitive in linguistic theory.
All are welcome!