In his 1993 book Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground Kornblith argues that inductive knowledge is possible by virtue of a fit between our innate psychological capacities and the causal structure of the world. Following Boyd, Kornblith takes the causal structure in question to be a structure of natural kinds, i.e., of homeostatically clustered properties. Such natural kinds provide a natural ground for inductive inference by virtue of the fact that our innate inferential tendencies are structured in a way that assumes a world of natural kinds, and, thereby, tend to provide us with accurate beliefs about the world in an environment populated by such natural kinds.
Kornblith is perhaps most well known for his defense of the view that knowledge is a natural kind. This claim is defended in his book Knowledge and its Place in Nature where Kornblith argues that knowledge, as it is being studied in cognitive ethology, is a sufficiently robust and inductively valuable category to qualify as a natural kind. Consequently, he claims, the proper method for epistemology is empirical, contrary to what has been assumed by most epistemologists, who traditionally have proceeded by way of conceptual analysis and the probing of intuitions rather than by way of empirical investigation.
Against conceptual analysis
Kornblith's case for knowledge as a natural kind provides the basis for his critique of philosophy as conceptual analysis. According to Kornblith, the proper object of philosophical analysis is not concepts, but the phenomena picked out by those concepts. At the same time, Kornblith's work in semantics indicates that his claims about conceptual analysis can, in fact, be motivated independently of his view on knowledge as a natural kind. In particular, he has argued that semantic externalism provides the correct semantics not only for natural kinds but also for artifactual kinds — a claim that, if true, would lend plausibility to the idea that empirical investigation provides a promising philosophical method, quite independently of whether or not a majority of the objects of philosophical inquiry turn out to be natural kinds.
Books
Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground, MIT Press, 1993.
Naturalizing Epistemology,, MIT Press, 1985. 2nd Edition, 1994.
"A Reliabilist Solution to the Problem of Promiscuous Bootstrapping," Analysis, 2009, 69.
"The Naturalistic Project in Epistemology: Where Do We Go from Here?," in C. Mi and R. Chen,, Naturalized Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, Rodopi, 2007, 39-59.
"How to Refer to Artifacts," in E. Margolis and S. Laurence,, Creations of the Mind: Essays on Artifacts and their Representation, Oxford University Press, 2007, 138-149.
"The Metaphysical Status of Knowledge," Philosophical Issues, 2007, 17, 145–164.
"Appeals to Intuition and the Ambitions of Epistemology," in S. Hetherington,, Epistemology Futures, Oxford University Press, 2006, 10-25.
"The Role of Intuition in Philosophical Inquiry," in M. DePaul and W. Ramsey,, Rethinking Intuition, Rowman and Littlefield, 1998, 129-141.
"Referring to Artifacts," Philosophical Review, LXXXIX, 1980, 109-114.
