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Carving Nature at the Joints

This paper discusses a philosophical issue in taxonomy. At least one philosopher has suggested the taxonomic principle that scientific kinds are disjoint. An opposing position is defended here by marshalling examples of nondisjoint categories which belong to different, coexisting classification schemes. This denial of the disjointness principle can be recast as the claim that scientific classification is "interest-relative". But why would anyone have held that scientific categories are disjoint in the first place? It is argued that this assumption is needed in one attempt to derive essentialism. This shows why the essentialist and interest-relative approaches to classification are in conflict.