ABSTRACT
The causal picture of reference for natural-kind terms goes something like this.1 We start with a sample of something.2 The sample may be of a kind of stuff, like gold, or of a biological kind – some things in a cage that don’t mind reproducing with one another; the sample can be of events, instances of a certain collection of symptoms, or examples of a particular process. In each of these cases, we use what’s in hand (the samples)3 to refer to an entire kind: In the first two cases, we refer to a kind that contains the sample – in the latter two cases, we might refer to a natural event-kind containing the sample; but, more often, we refer to a kind that contains the causes of the events sampled.
