Devitt’s Shocking Idea and Analyticity Without Apriority
Devitt’s Shocking Idea and Analyticity Without Apriority

Summary/Abstract: Natural kind terms don’t have descriptive meanings, Devitt claims. The paper argues that this claim is tantamount to denying the existence of natural kind concepts, in the usual sense of “concept”, since concepts are predicate meanings. The denial is counterintuitive, and has bad epistemological consequences, since natural kind concepts are among the building blocks of our understanding of the world. The paper ends with a positive proposal, featuring a bold claim: if the standard Kripke-Putnam line on semantics of natural kind terms is correct, and if there are natural kind concepts, then propositions analyzing these concepts are not a priori knowable. Analyticity does not entail apriority.

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