Ontological status: biological species as individuals or sets? Thoughts?
Two apparently distinct ontological distinctions: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#SpeInd vs http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#SpeSet After the development of set theory, however, a distinction of the scholastics between intension, of sets that were circumscribed by definitions, and extension, by member inclusion, was revived, and the logical tradition of species was held to be a matter of intensional definition. In a seminal summary of the traditional pre-set theoretic logic of diairesis, or division, from the most general to the most specific, H. W. Joseph (1916) made a clear distinction, as Whately had 90 years earlier in 1826 (see below), between logical species and “natural” species, but the developers of the essentialism story failed to pick this up, and read him as saying that species of living things were the same as the logical species (as discussed in Chung 2003, Winsor 2001, 2003, 2006a). In a discussion of what counted as a kind in natural history, William Whewell in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) gave a good account of natural kinds as being types from which there were deviations, although he treated species themselves as simple objects. John Stuart Mill disagreed and asserted that natural kinds were definable and had universal (causal) properties for all members (Mill 2006).1 For Whewell, the type of the taxonomist was a natural kind; for Mill, it was the element and the compound of chemistry and physics. Still, I believe the weight of venerable history is on Whewell’s side, not Mill’s, or to put it another way, that Mill’s conception of natural kinds is not something that applies well to historical sciences that are restricted to specific domains, like natural history or taxonomy. And despite what we might think based on the discussion of logic from Frege onwards, as late as the early 20th century, for instance with John Venn (1866) and others, a natural kind was indeed typically thought to be a kind of living beings, caused by generation (Hacking 1991). So much of the confusion about essences can be resolved if we do not adopt the view that Mill introduced, that a real Kind must have a set of necessary and sufficient properties. For Mill, a species would be a natural kind (a phrase introduced by Venn, although he did not adopt the Millian view regarding it; Mill just used the word Kind) if it had some set of universally shared properties that made each organism a member of it, rather like having a certain number of electrons, positrons and neutrons makes each atom of an element that element. By contrast, for Whewell, and for those taxonomists who he was accurately describing in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, to be a member of some group, a species, a genus, and so on, is to be mostly like the typical form, and to be something that can be supposed to share a genealogy with that form. This sense of “essence” is something that, I believe, is quite consistent with our present understanding of genetics and populations; most members of most species share most genes, but there are multiple genetic controls over some typical traits, and some species have major genomic varieties. David Hull has said that there is nothing so unusual or absurd in biology that some species doesn’t have it somewhere or somewhen; I call this Hull’s Rule. To be an essentialist in the world of Hull’s Rule means that you cannot insist that taxa are going to always have some set of genetic or other causes, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t say that taxa mostly share causes. To be a taxon, I think, is to have some set of general properties, the bulk of which any member will share.2 This is sometimes called in philosophy the “family resemblance predicate”, after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s example in the Philosophical Investigations (Pigliucci 2003, Wittgenstein 1968), but over a century before Wittgenstein, Whewell made just this case. Families resemble each other because they share generative histories and hence generative causes, but they share them typically. The thesis known as the Individuality Thesis (Gayon 1996, Ghiselin 1997, Hull 1978), in which species are considered to be not kinds, but named objects that have a historical location, is a defense of biology, and especially genetics, against the encroachment of Mill’s notion of a Natural Kind. Sure, say the individualists, species and other biological taxa are not Natural Kinds (as defined by Mill). The only other metaphysical notion open to philosophers of taxonomy is that of an Individual, a thing that exists in one time and one place or region, and has a start and an ending. Hence, species are Individuals. I cannot fault this logic – species clearly aren’t the kinds of Kinds that Mill required, and they actually are historical objects, so I have no objection to their being called Individuals; but I do think they have “essences”, or, rather, typical developmental systems and responses to typical environments; to
Re: Ontological status: biological species as individuals or sets? Thoughts?
Ontological status is always within some model we have created. So one can created models in which species are defined extenstionally and create different models in which they are defined intensionally. So what? They are both our creations to help understand the world. Does one work better? Have more predictive power? Do they imply some operational tests? It is a waste of time to argue about essences and which one is really real. Brent On 10/23/2013 8:10 PM, Francisco Boni wrote: Two apparently distinct ontological distinctions: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#SpeInd vs http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#SpeSet After the development of set theory, however, a distinction of the scholastics between intension, of sets that were circumscribed by definitions, and extension, by member inclusion, was revived, and the logical tradition of species was held to be a matter of intensional definition. In a seminal summary of the traditional pre-set theoretic logic of diairesis, or division, from the most general to the most specific, H. W. Joseph (1916) made a clear distinction, as Whately had 90 years earlier in 1826 (see below), between logical species and “natural” species, but the developers of the essentialism story failed to pick this up, and read him as saying that species of living things were the same as the logical species (as discussed in Chung 2003, Winsor 2001, 2003, 2006a). In a discussion of what counted as a kind in natural history, William Whewell in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) gave a good account of natural kinds as being types from which there were deviations, although he treated species themselves as simple objects. John Stuart Mill disagreed and asserted that natural kinds were definable and had universal (causal) properties for all members (Mill 2006).1 For Whewell, the type of the taxonomist was a natural kind; for Mill, it was the element and the compound of chemistry and physics. Still, I believe the weight of venerable history is on Whewell’s side, not Mill’s, or to put it another way, that Mill’s conception of natural kinds is not something that applies well to historical sciences that are restricted to specific domains, like natural history or taxonomy. And despite what we might think based on the discussion of logic from Frege onwards, as late as the early 20th century, for instance with John Venn (1866) and others, a natural kind was indeed typically thought to be a kind of living beings, caused by generation (Hacking 1991). So much of the confusion about essences can be resolved if we do not adopt the view that Mill introduced, that a real Kind must have a set of necessary and sufficient properties. For Mill, a species would be a natural kind (a phrase introduced by Venn, although he did not adopt the Millian view regarding it; Mill just used the word Kind) if it had some set of universally shared properties that made each organism a member of it, rather like having a certain number of electrons, positrons and neutrons makes each atom of an element that element. By contrast, for Whewell, and for those taxonomists who he was accurately describing in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, to be a member of some group, a species, a genus, and so on, is to be mostly like the typical form, and to be something that can be supposed to share a genealogy with that form. This sense of “essence” is something that, I believe, is quite consistent with our present understanding of genetics and populations; most members of most species share most genes, but there are multiple genetic controls over some typical traits, and some species have major genomic varieties. David Hull has said that there is nothing so unusual or absurd in biology that some species doesn’t have it somewhere or somewhen; I call this Hull’s Rule. To be an essentialist in the world of Hull’s Rule means that you cannot insist that taxa are going to always have some set of genetic or other causes, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t say that taxa mostly share causes. To be a taxon, I think, is to have some set of general properties, the bulk of which any member will share.2 This is sometimes called in philosophy the “family resemblance predicate”, after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s example in the Philosophical Investigations (Pigliucci 2003, Wittgenstein 1968), but over a century before Wittgenstein, Whewell made just this case. Families resemble each other because they share generative histories and hence generative causes, but they share them typically. The thesis known as the Individuality Thesis (Gayon 1996, Ghiselin 1997, Hull 1978), in which species are considered to be not kinds, but named objects that have a historical location, is a defense of biology, and especially genetics, against the encroachment of Mill’s notion of a Natural Kind. Sure, say the individualists, species and other biological taxa are not Natural Kinds (as defined by Mill). The only other metaphysical
Re: Ontological status: biological species as individuals or sets? Thoughts?
It seems biologists (and philosophers of biology) think that Kitcher's motivation for asserting that species are sets is to allow spatiotemporally unrestricted groups of organisms to form species. That motivation, however, is not substantiated by biological theory or practice. Species as sets (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#SpeSet for context) So it seems that this apparent prevalent opinion (according to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is rooted on the fact that defining them as set is *difficult* for the scientist, because it is hard to compute and modify the necessary and sufficient of their relationships and processes that guarantee set membership, it seems that intensional definitions cannot the capture historical development of distributed organisms that happen to be taxonomically linked from tiem to time. So one define species as Individuals and it seems easier to track their historical development. What bothers me is that this seems, like you said, a matter of model-theoretic reference and a kind of heuristic shortcut, an argument derived from computational complexity. On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 2:08 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Ontological status is always within some model we have created. So one can created models in which species are defined extenstionally and create different models in which they are defined intensionally. So what? They are both our creations to help understand the world. Does one work better? Have more predictive power? Do they imply some operational tests? It is a waste of time to argue about essences and which one is really real. Brent On 10/23/2013 8:10 PM, Francisco Boni wrote: Two apparently distinct ontological distinctions: http://plato.stanford.edu/**entries/species/#SpeIndhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#SpeIndvs http://plato.stanford.edu/**entries/species/#SpeSethttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#SpeSet After the development of set theory, however, a distinction of the scholastics between intension, of sets that were circumscribed by definitions, and extension, by member inclusion, was revived, and the logical tradition of species was held to be a matter of intensional definition. In a seminal summary of the traditional pre-set theoretic logic of diairesis, or division, from the most general to the most specific, H. W. Joseph (1916) made a clear distinction, as Whately had 90 years earlier in 1826 (see below), between logical species and “natural” species, but the developers of the essentialism story failed to pick this up, and read him as saying that species of living things were the same as the logical species (as discussed in Chung 2003, Winsor 2001, 2003, 2006a). In a discussion of what counted as a kind in natural history, William Whewell in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) gave a good account of natural kinds as being types from which there were deviations, although he treated species themselves as simple objects. John Stuart Mill disagreed and asserted that natural kinds were definable and had universal (causal) properties for all members (Mill 2006).1 For Whewell, the type of the taxonomist was a natural kind; for Mill, it was the element and the compound of chemistry and physics. Still, I believe the weight of venerable history is on Whewell’s side, not Mill’s, or to put it another way, that Mill’s conception of natural kinds is not something that applies well to historical sciences that are restricted to specific domains, like natural history or taxonomy. And despite what we might think based on the discussion of logic from Frege onwards, as late as the early 20th century, for instance with John Venn (1866) and others, a natural kind was indeed typically thought to be a kind of living beings, caused by generation (Hacking 1991). So much of the confusion about essences can be resolved if we do not adopt the view that Mill introduced, that a real Kind must have a set of necessary and sufficient properties. For Mill, a species would be a natural kind (a phrase introduced by Venn, although he did not adopt the Millian view regarding it; Mill just used the word Kind) if it had some set of universally shared properties that made each organism a member of it, rather like having a certain number of electrons, positrons and neutrons makes each atom of an element that element. By contrast, for Whewell, and for those taxonomists who he was accurately describing in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, to be a member of some group, a species, a genus, and so on, is to be mostly like the typical form, and to be something that can be supposed to share a genealogy with that form. This sense of “essence” is something that, I believe, is quite consistent with our present understanding of genetics and populations; most members of most species share most genes, but there are multiple genetic controls over some typical traits, and
