113. Muhammad Ali Khalidi | Natural Kinds

[@mf_hume]

Congrats on landing Kevin Spacey as a guest!

[@cropframe]

an amazing convo. thank you. shame about his love of hamas islamonazis

[@cropframe]

altho I am confused about the happiness with which you react to his rejection of essentialism and possible worlds talk: textbook justification for the introduction of natural kinds was the desire to explain why references to "things" persist through re-conceptualizations, through changes of descriptions, through the scientific revolutions and periods of intellectual savagery. Without that persistence, invariance there is no such thing as scientific progress - instead of progress we simply have people talking about different things using perhaps the same world. How do you and him (seems you appear to agree on unimportance of modal characterization) explain that persistence? Scientific knowledge is the paradigm of knowledge, and one of the main , perhaps THE main reson for trusting it is that it is cumulative. Being cumulative, allowing for the notion of progress in conversation about the same topic. -as opposed to time-indexed sequence of fads - is an extremely strong requirement in itself, and for now the best explication involved modalized story about natural kinds