REFERENCIAL SEMANTICS AND THE MEANING OF NATURAL KIND TERMS

In this article I have taken certain ideas from Montague-semantics as my starting point, and distinguished clearly semantics from epistemology. The meaning of a sentence is said to be its truth conditions, which are assumed to be established by two components: syntactical structure and the referents of structureless terms. On this theoretical background, I try to give an account for the meaning of natural kind terms. My thesis is that the meaning of natural kind terms is its reference, i.e. the natural kind, which the term refers to.