According to the familiar view of scientific inquiry that I have been examining, scientists draw conclusions about the nature of kinds that were named before much science was known. Birds are dinosaurs, scientists have concluded, and water is H 2 O. These conclusions are supposed to be discoveries about the essences of the bird kind and the water kind. The words ‘bird’, ‘dinosaur’, and ‘water’ are not supposed to have changed in meaning. I have argued that this account of the conceptual change in question is not right. I have argued that biologists' conclusions, or future conclusions, about the essences of kinds recognized before current systematic theory are in general not discovered to be true. I have focused on kinds from biology, but similar words apply to kinds from chemistry, the other major source of natural-kind terms. My aim in this chapter is to show that. Much of the motivation for supposing that scientists' conclusions about natural kinds' structures are discoveries about essences comes from Hilary Putnam's famous Twin Earth thought experiment, which concerns a chemical kind: water (Putnam 1975e, pp. 223–27). Twin Earth is a distant planet just like ours except that the waterlike substance on that planet has a long, complicated chemical composition that is abbreviated ‘XYZ’. XYZ looks like water on Earth, tastes like it, comes down in the form of rain, fills rivers, lakes, and oceans, and so on.
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