The Ontology of Interactive Kinds
Abstract This paper defends the notions of an interactive kind and a looping effect as features of social and human scientific classifications and aims to give a realist interpretation of them. I argue that interactive kinds can best be modeled as a special case of changing causal property cluster kinds. In order to do so, I develop a typology of looping effects according to the sort of entities that are affected, the main types of which are individual looping, category looping, and kind looping. Based on this distinction, I identify interactive kinds as those causal property cluster kinds that are subjected to kind looping.