This is a revised version of this essay which used to be 28 pages. Feel free to contact me for the original submission or any other queries at
[email protected] Is Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth a Scientist? fictional entities, natural kinds, and a justified contradiction1 I. Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth I aim to focus this paper on understanding empty names in the theme of natural kind distinctions. I take a kind distinction to mean a kinder is kinding and categorically separating from other things ~x, things x by properties that the thing x shares with other things x that are members.2 The kind would be the set that the property sharers are members of. So, a kind as an example can be the set of things with four legs. Lassie has four legs, so that makes her an x. The table on which my laptop is placed as I write this sentence (its name is Jean Paul Sartre) also has four legs, so it is an x. Oscar Pistorius does not have legs, which makes him a ~x. This category would be too broad to be sufficient since there are an infinity of sets we could make. Four-leggedness would not constitute natural kinds. I think a natural kind (if there are such things) is a set that is distinct from other sets by meaningful distinctions of certain properties. By meaningfully distinct of certain properties, I mean to say that the kind x cannot be the kind x without some specific properties or it would be a ~x.