Global ETD Search
Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 13 of 13 for “"natural kinds"”.
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Protein Classification and Natural Kinds
… classification practices to the debate over natural kinds. I address which classificatory practice is likely to pick out a natural kind. I defend the thesis that dynamics is a fundamental description of proteins as kinds. This view is widely held in biochemistry but is absent from …
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Disease Kinds and Functional Explanations.
… thesis is concerned with the character of kinds in human somatic pathology and the relation that these kinds and their members have with function-based explanations. More precisely, in the first part of the thesis I investigate whether diseased organisms, grouped together on grounds of …
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An Inquiry Concerning the Nature of Racial Discourse
… realism, according to which races are genetic natural kinds or distinct parts of the human phylogenetic tree. I show—on both empirical and theoretical grounds—that the reality of race cannot be supported in this way. Then, I turn to evolutionary biology and psychology for a proper account of …
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Making and remaking quantum field theory
… by physicists to the structures of putative natural kinds upon which they predicated their research. The second episode occurred during the 1960's and 1970's when important features of quantum field theory were given new interpretations that arose from the exchange of methods and insights …
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Essences and Transformations in Objects, Animals, and Humans
Research as to how humans group natural kinds, such as animals, is essential to understanding categorization processes. However, it lacks conventional application and generalization to everyday life. Humans are social beings that encounter a wide array of individuals on a daily basis. In these …
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Exploring the relationship between fusion with a cause and essentialist thinking
… of the cause by categorizing them into distinct “natural kinds” based on their ideological stance toward the cause. This tendency for essentialist thinking leads strongly fused individuals to discriminate against people who hold opposing beliefs about the cause. To test these ideas, I conducted 6 …
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Against Modalities: On the Presumed Coherence and Alleged Indispensability of Some Modal Notions
Part I investigates the idea that kinds (as opposed to individuals) have some modal properties. I argue that concerning typical kind-essentialist claims there is a non-trivial question—the transworld identity problem—about what the relevant kind terms are supposed to refer to in non-actual possible …
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Does autism merit belief? : Developing an account of scientific realism for psychiatry
… argues against psychiatric classifications as natural kinds and against notions that inductive knowledge of psychiatric classifications requires robust causes. I outline psychiatric classifications as scientific laws. They are high level idealised models which guide construction of lower level, …
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Representing and Constructing. Psychometrics from the perspectives of measurement theory and concept formation.
… cohere with intuitions and/or pick out so-called natural kinds, while many psychometricians argue that concepts should pick out real as opposed to constructed attributes. I argue that, when it comes to social scientific measurement, it is much more important to focus on the usefulness of the …
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Radical Pluralism, Ontological Underdetermination, and the Role of Values in Species Classification
… theoretical assumptions concerning species and natural kinds that form the broad framework within which the arguments of the thesis are placed. The aim of this chapter is to introduce a set of relatively uncontroversial assumptions that frame the rest of the thesis. On the basis of these …
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Making Change Intelligible: Why The Study of Human Kinds Is Just Science As Usual
… a fundamentally different methodology from the natural sciences due to the interactivity of human kinds. By examining the concept of classificatory looping and its impact on human kinds, the author argues that understanding the causal pathways and utilizing behavioral science can offer reliable …
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Security and Securitization in Israel
… 21). According to Michael (2009, p. 689), these kinds of threats "can be defined as a trend, processor development that substantially endangers the existence of the state of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people". Thus, for 73 years since its establishment, the State of Israel has …
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Property Inference Decision-Making and Decision Switching of Undergraduate Engineers: Implications for Ideational Diversity & Fluency through Movements in a Cartesian Concept Design Space
Design fixation is a phenomenon experienced by professional designers and engineering design students that stifles creativity and innovation through discouraging ideational productivity, fluency and diversity. During the design idea and concept generation phase of the design process, a reliance on …