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Katarina Perovic, The Logical Structure of Kinds, By Eric Funkhouser, Analysis, Volume 76, Issue 4, October 2016, Pages 549–553, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anw063
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In his engaging and ambitious book The Logical Structure of Kinds, Eric Funkhouser has two main aims – to provide an account of the structure of scientific kinds, and to fruitfully apply such an account to multiple realizability. Correspondingly, the first part of the book is preoccupied with the metaphysical project of providing and defending a particular analysis of properties and kinds, while the second part of the book engages the debates in philosophy of mind concerning the concept of multiple realizability.
The starting point for Funkhouser is the Moorean fact that there are objective similarities between different particular things and that special sciences are engaged, in part, in providing taxonomies of scientifically relevant similarities. Funkhouser takes respects in which different particulars resemble to be grounded in their properties, where by properties he has in mind unrepeatable particulars, that is tropes (or ‘abstract particulars’ in D.C. Williams’s sense) (9). However, just as particulars resemble one another in various respects, so do their properties – red resembles orange more than it resembles blue, a square resembles a rectangle more than it resembles a triangle and so on. Thus, if we are to gain a deeper understanding of different resemblance structures, it is essential to focus not just on property tokens but also on property types. Funkhouser defines kinds as such property types, and he makes it his task to examine their relationship to property tokens as well as their relationships to one another.1
