Making sense of essentialism

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2001

A famous debate between John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus at the end of the seventeenth century has often been referred to as signalling the beginning of a rift between classificatory methods relying on logical division and classificatory methods relying on empirical grouping. Interestingly, a couple of decades later, Linnaeus showed very little excitement in reviewing this debate, and this although he was the first to introduce the terminological distinction of artificial vs. natural methods. In this paper, I will explain Linnaeus's indifference by the fact that earlier debates were revolving around problems of plant diagnosis rather than classification. From Linnaeus's perspective, they were therefore concerned with what he called artificial methods alonediagnostic tools, that is, which were artificial no matter which characters were taken into account. The natural method Linnaeus proposed, on the other hand, was not about diagnosis, but about relations of equivalence which played a vital, although largely implicit role in the practices of specimen exchange on which naturalists relied to acquire knowledge of the natural world.

History of European Ideas, 2004

Biology & Philosophy, 2003

The current widespread belief that taxonomic methods used before Darwin were essentialist is ill-founded. The essentialist method developed by followers of Plato and Aristotle required definitions to state properties that are always present. Polythetic groups do not obey that requirement, whatever may have been the ontological beliefs of the taxonomist recognizing such groups. Two distinct methods of forming higher taxa, by chaining and by examplar, were widely used in the period between Linnaeus and Darwin, and both generated polythetic groups. Philosopher William Whewell congratulated pre-Darwinian taxonomists for not adhering to the rigid ideal of definition used in the mathematical sciences. What he called the “method of types” is here called the “method of exemplars” because typology has been equated with essentialism, whereas the use of a type species as the reference point or prototype for a higher category was a practice inconsistent with essentialism. The story that the essentialism of philosophers dominated the development of systematics may prove to be a myth.

2013

A famous debate between John Ray, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus at the end of the seventeenth century has often been referred to as signalling the beginning of a rift between classificatory methods relying on logical division and classificatory methods relying on empirical grouping. Interestingly, a couple of decades later, Linnaeus showed very little excitement in reviewing this debate, and this although he was the first to introduce the terminological distinction of artificial vs. natural methods. In this paper, I will explain Linnaeus's indifference by the fact that earlier debates were revolving around problems of plant diagnosis rather than classification. From Linnaeus's perspective, they were therefore concerned with what he called artificial methods alonediagnostic tools, that is, which were artificial no matter which characters were taken into account. The natural method Linnaeus proposed, on the other hand, was not about diagnosis, but about relations of equivalence which played a vital, although largely implicit role in the practices of specimen exchange on which naturalists relied to acquire knowledge of the natural world.

This thesis analyses the issues related to the claim that folk people and pre-Darwinian taxonomists posses(ed) an essentialist reasoning bias that was or should be abandoned as a result of adopting evolutionary theory, or in order to understand it. By conducting a conceptual, historical and methodological analysis, I aim to show that this claim is flawed, confused or oversimplified. The conceptual analysis reveals that there are some common reasoning flaws concerning essentialism: 1) confusing different reasoning patterns that are merely indicative of essentialism with essentialism itself; 2) over-correlating the reasoning patterns that are usually associated with essentialism – assuming that if one is present, so are others, and if one is abandoned, others are too; and 3) conflating individual and kind essentialism. I am going to illustrate how these reasoning flaws express themselves in the claims concerning the history of biology and folk essentialism, and how they could be revealed and refuted in those contexts. In the context of the former, the 'Darwinian revolution' is seen as the turning point for abandoning essentialism. As the pre-Darwinian taxonomists probably were not essentialists, I claim this depiction of the 'Darwinian revolution' to be mostly the result of confusions 1) and 2). The pre-Darwinian flawed reasoning patterns were not essentialist and were not abandoned all at once. The flawed claims in the context of folk biology are mostly the result of all three confusions. The reasoning patterns that are associated with psychological essentialism are taken to be essentialism; the claims about folk reasoning concerning individual essences are extended to kind essences; and the reasoning patterns that are inconsistent with evolutionary theory correlated with those that are not. Concerning folk biology, I will also discuss the issue of the alleged innateness of the cognitive structures and concepts that are associated with folk essentialism.

Biological Essentialism

A few philosophers of biology have recently explicitly rejected Essential Membership, the doctrine that if an individual organism belongs to a taxon, particularly a species, it does so essentially. But philosophers of biology have not addressed the broader issue, much discussed by metaphysicians on the basis of modal intuitions, of what is essential to the organism. In this chapter, I address that issue from a biological basis, arguing for the Kripkean view that an organism has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, essence. The arguments appeal to the demands of biological explanation and are analogous to arguments that I have given earlier that a taxon has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, essence. These conclusions about the essences of individuals and taxa yield an argument for Essential Membership. Finally, I reject four objections that LaPorte has made to Essential Membership.

The Eyebrow, 2018

What is a biological species 1 ? If we are to introduce how philosophy can be of any help to evolutionary biology, then we can argue that the contribution of philosophy to evolutionary biology can be best understood through the analysis of a single case study.

It is time to escape the constraints of the Systematics Wars narrative and pursue new questions that are better positioned to establish the relevance of the field in this time period to broader issues in the history of biology and history of science. To date, the underlying assumptions of the Systematics Wars narrative have led historians to prioritize theory over practice and the conflicts of a few leading theorists over the less-polarized interactions of systematists at large. We show how shifting to a practice-oriented view of methodology, centered on the trajectory of mathematization in systematics, demonstrates problems with the common view that one camp (cladistics) straightforwardly ''won'' over the other (phenetics). In particular, we critique David Hull's historical account in Science as a Process by demonstrating exactly the sort of intermediate level of positive sharing between phenetic and cladistic theories that undermines their mutually exclusive individuality as conceptual systems over time. It is misleading, or at least inadequate, to treat them simply as holistically opposed theories that can only interact by competition to the death. Looking to the future, we suggest that the concept of workflow provides an important new perspective on the history of mathematization and computerization in biology after World War II.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2012

Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in 'data-driven research.' Historians of early modern science have begun to emphasize its crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, and some observers of present day genomics see it as engaged in a return to natural history practices. A key concept that was developed to understand the dynamics of early modern natural history is that of 'information overload.' Taxonomic systems, rules of nomenclature, technical terminologies and even theories of evolution were developed in botany and zoology to catch up with the ever increasing amount of information on hitherto unknown plant and animal species. In our contribution, we want to expand on this concept. After all, the same people who complain about information overload are usually the ones who contribute to it most significantly. In order to understand this complex relationship, we will turn to the annotation practices of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). The very tools that Linnaeus developed to contain and reduce information overload, as we aim to demonstrate, 2 facilitated a veritable information explosion that led to the emergence of a new research object in botany: the so-called 'natural' system. Keywords Linnaeus Information overload Natural History Genus Natural System Paper technologies 1. Introduction: Linnaeus and data-driven research Early modern natural and experimental history, as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) called it, perhaps forms the prototype of what one could call 'datadriven' research. Fuelled by the revaluation of practical knowledge in court culture, the print revolution, and overseas discoveries and trade, Europe was flooded with accounts of particulars: manuals of military technology, collections of pharmacological recipes, medical case histories, descriptions of exotic plant and animal species (Long, 2001; Pomata and Siraisi, 2005; Cook 2007). Little of this early modern literature could be called hypothesis-driven in any conceivable sense. It aimed primarily at the compilation of facts, not confirmation of preconceived theories. Yet, as Bacon had already observed, heaping up bits of isolated knowledge would never be enough to achieve this aim. Compilation produced its own epistemological problems. 'Natural and experimental history is so various and scattered,' Bacon observed in Novum