The Ontology of Interactive Kinds

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• looping effects
• interactive kinds
• social scientific classifications
• Ian Hacking
• causal property cluster theory