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Full Idea
It seems to me that it is right to call a lion's offspring a 'lion' and a horse's offspring a 'horse' (I'm talking about natural offspring, not some monster). ...but by the same argument any offspring of a king should be called a 'king'.
Gist of Idea
The natural offspring of a lion is called a 'lion' (but what about the offspring of a king?)
Source
Plato (Cratylus [c.377 BCE], 393b)
Book Ref
Plato: 'Complete Works', ed/tr. Cooper,John M. [Hackett 1997], p.112
A Reaction
The standard modern difficulty is whether all descendants of dinosaurs are still called 'dinosaur', which they are not.
| 13779 | The natural offspring of a lion is called a 'lion' (but what about the offspring of a king?) [Plato] |
| 16663 | Things are limited by the species to certain modes of being [Olivi] |
| 19448 | Consciousness is said to distinguish man from animals - consciousness of his own species [Feuerbach] |
| 17049 | 'Tiger' designates a species, and merely looking like the species is not enough [Kripke] |
| 17050 | Tigers may lack all the properties we originally used to identify them [Kripke] |
| 17051 | The original concept of 'cat' comes from paradigmatic instances [Kripke] |
| 17372 | The higher categories are not natural kinds, so the Linnaean hierarchy should be given up [Devitt] |
| 17373 | Species pluralism says there are several good accounts of what a species is [Devitt] |
| 17369 | We name species as small to share properties, but large enough to yield generalisations [Devitt] |
| 17367 | Species are phenetic, biological, niche, or phylogenetic-cladistic [Devitt, by PG] |
| 17383 | Species are the lowest-level classification in biology [Dupré] |
| 17386 | The theory of evolution is mainly about species [Dupré] |
| 17366 | Virtually all modern views of speciation rest on relational rather than intrinsic features [Okasha] |