Natural Kinds and Conceptual Truth

Ferenc Huoranszki, in Natural Kinds and Conceptual Truth, presents, at the very beginning of the paper, a fictional example, which is, in fact, a real life example about cases when the content of a natural kind term is determined by its microphysical constitution that exists in abundance. Even if it is true of the concept of water or gold that their content was originally determined by water’s and gold’s sensible qualities and that we
discovered their constitution only later, this is pretty much a contingent fact not about gold or water, but about how we actually introduce a term into our language. A procedure in the opposite direction is equally possible. Some chemical elements’ and compounds’ names have been first introduced by identifying their constitution, and hence it seems an a priori matter that their concept refers to some stuff with that type of constitution. Consequently, by what properties we fix a natural kind term’s reference – or how we provide cognitive content – should be irrelevant regarding the modal status of propositions involving the terms. For any moderately realist account of the nature of modal truth, it must be unacceptable that a truth’s modal status is merely determined by such historical accidents.