Are any kinds ontologically fundamental?
Alexander Bird · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2011
E. J. Lowe regards kinds as ontologically fundamental although David Armstrong takes a reductive attitude towards natural kinds. This chapter examines Lowe's claim, and concludes that it is unwarranted. Lowe has an ontology of four categories, in which we have individual substances (objects, particulars), modes (property/relation instances, tropes), and two species of universal: attributes (non-substantial universals, properties/relations) and substantial universals (kinds). Lowe claims that his ontology has an advantage over Armstrong's when it comes to our understanding of the laws of nature. Lowe's account of laws does not provide a metaphysics that avoids the inference problem for Armstrong, and so does not give us an independent, metaphysical reason for adopting a category of kinds. The chapter argues that analogous metaphysical problems in accounting for the relationship of laws to particulars beset Lowe's four-category ontology as much as Armstrong's two category ontology.