Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Natural Kinds and Proper Names

I've been thinking a lot lately about how the term 'God' is used in the Bible and in natural language. Take the following occurrences of 'God' in the Bible:

(1) And God saw that it was good.

Clearly (1) 'God' is used to refer to a specific being. It seems as if the occurrence of 'God' in (1) could not be a natural kind but functions similar to the following:

(2) Tiger hunts by using stealth.

What if we changed (2) to the following and made it into a definite description:

(2') The tiger hunts by using stealth.

Now let's (1) into a definite description.

(1') And The God saw that it was good.

Something seems strange about (1') almost as if we are using it to pick out a particular unique being. However, the term 'God' seems to function similarly to 'tiger' in both examples.

Let's see if we can find an occurrence of 'God' as a natural kind.

(3) Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?

Here specifically (3) is addressing YHWH and it seems to pick out YHWH as one among many gods. However, the speaker is claiming that YHWH is unique among the other gods. Yet, 'gods' is functioning as a natural kind. Similar to the following locution. Let's say that we're talking to Shere Khan and expressing to him is incomparable worth to other tigers.

(4) Who is like you, O Shere Khan, among the tigers?

So clearly 'god' can be used as a natural kind such as 'tiger'. Perhaps the difference between 'God' and other natural kinds is that we often use 'God' as a subject term the same way that we would use a proper name.

My initial intuitions about this are that 'God' is semantically a natural kind term, however, we do use it pragmatically as a proper name or a disguised definite description.

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