The Ontology of Interactive Kinds

• Main Author: Hauswald Rico
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2016-08-01
• Series: Journal of Social Ontology
• Subjects: looping effects; interactive kinds; social scientific classifications; ian hacking; causal property cluster theory
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/jso-2015-0049

This paper defends the notions of an interactive kind and a looping effect as features of social and human scientific classifications and aims to give a realist interpretation of them. I argue that interactive kinds can best be modeled as a special case of changing causal property cluster kinds. In order to do so, I develop a typology of looping effects according to the sort of entities that are affected, the main types of which are individual-looping, category-looping, and kind-looping. Based on this distinction, I identify interactive kinds as those causal property cluster kinds that are subjected to kind-looping.