In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey‐making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. Here, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences.

中文翻译：

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反对目的论本质主义

在最近的两篇论文中，Rose 和 Nichols 提出的证据支持这样一种观点，即人类根据最终目的（例如蜂蜜制作）而不是根据科学本质（例如蜜蜂 DNA）来表示类别本质。在这里，我挑战他们对证据的解释，并表明他们试图破坏的主要理论直接预测了这一点。我认为他们的结果可以解释为关于科学本质的诊断推理的实例。