94 Defining the meaning of words

the noun 'sunrise', or the verb 'rise' used of the sun, mean some­thing different now from what it (and its translation-equivalents in other languages) used to mean in pre-Copernican times (and still means for some people)? We shall have occasion to return to questions of this kind from time to time in later chapters. Such questions have been raised here because the discussion of natural kinds by philosophers has been of such importance in lin­guistic semantics in recent years.

The discussion of natural kinds has been of particular impor­tance when it has also included, or has been combined with, the discussion of what have come to be called prototypes (which will be dealt with in the following section). The main philosophi­cal thrust of the discussion of natural kinds is to cast doubt on what might be referred to as the classical view of definition in terms of the specification of the necessary and sufficient condi­tions for class-membership. As we shall see later, it has also had the effect of rehabilitating, or updating and rendering more plausible, a particular version of ostensive definition.

Before we take up the question of semantic prototypes, in the following section, it should be pointed out that the term 'natural kind', and my presentation of the topic so far, is misleading in one respect. In view of the traditional associations of the term 'natural kind' and its philosophical underpinnings in current discussion, words denoting natural kinds in the traditional sense might be thought to differ semantically from words denoting what I will call cultural kinds, like 'dirt' or 'chair'. There is no reason to believe that they do. We have prototypes of the one as we have prototypes of the other and we give the same kind of open-ended definitions combining both phenomenal and functional criteria. In fact, natural kinds in the traditional sense are often combined and divided by languages, in just the way that structuralists have suggested, sometimes arbitrarily, but often for culturally explicable reasons. For example, 'fruit' and 'vegetable' each cover several different kinds, and in their most common, everyday, sense are fuzzy and indeterminate. In so far as their denotation is clear in their prototypical, nuclear or focal, sense the principal criterion which serves to classify a particular natural kind as being either a fruit or a vegetable is

3.3 Natural (and cultural) kinds 95

culinary: whether it is eaten, in English-speaking communities, as part of a main meal with meat or fish; whether it is used to make soup; and so on. The truth of the matter seems to be that the cultural and the natural are so intimately associated in the vocabularies of human languages that it is often impossible to say, in most cases, that the one is more basic than the other, in either of the two senses of 'basic' discussed in the preceding sec­tion.

This fact emerges very clearly from research that has been carried out on a wide variety of languages, in selected areas of the vocabulary, by anthropologists, psychologists and linguists. Much of this research has been inspired, in recent years, by the important and seminal work on the vocabulary of colour by Ber­lin and Kay (1969). Other areas of vocabulary that have been investigated from the same point of view include those of shape, botanical and biological nomenclature, and cooking. In general reviews of this work it is customary for authors to emphasize the cross-cultural validity of certain focal categories. It is no less important, however, to insist upon the fact that there is also a good deal of culture-dependent variation across languages. What I said about the meaning of 'fruit' and 'vegetable' in the previous paragraph is typical of all lexical fields, including those of colour and shape. For example, the fact that 'red' and 'white' are used to distinguish two broad categories of wine is something that cannot be accounted for in terms of the focal meanings of these words. It is a culturally established conven­tion, and one that must be learned as one learns to use 'red' and 'white' in a range of characteristic situations and characteristic collocations.

It must also be emphasized that what has been said in this sec­tion about the meaning of lexemes which denote natural (and cultural) kinds applies not only to lexemes denoting Entities and substances in the physical world, but also to abstract terms and to expressions denoting mythical or imaginary entities and sub­stances. In short, there is no reason to believe that there is any­thing special, from the point of view of linguistic semantics, about those words whose focal meaning is determined by the