From: John Wilkins (j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed 01 Jun 2005 - 01:26:54 GMT
On 01/06/2005, at 11:09 AM, Scott Chase wrote:
> Plus the word "bat" itself can be punned from its
> usage in baseball to its usage in mammalogy. Then we
> have a concept that can range from Dracula's favorite
> way of getting around (with all its Gothic
> representations) to a cute little pipistrelle. When we
> verge into categorization of living things, we are in
> Dr. John Wilkins's neck of the woods (species
> concepts). Yet there are toy bats that kids could
> dangle from the ceiling at Halloween, so we're still
> straddling between the natural and contrived (like
> with wooden and plastic sticks). In the naturalistic
> arena, for species concepts, there are some issues of
> nominalism too, like is it something that really
> exists as we think it is or are we just defining it
> with our label and lending it a degree of
> artificiality with our conceptualization of it and the
> way we represent it in our noggins? Maybe our label
> affixed to the species is contrived in a similar
> manner as the rubbery child's toy. That ought to get
> John foaming at the mouth if he's reading this :-)
Fortunately I'm not. But while not reading this, let me not make this
point: The view you are referring to is basically that of the
nominalists (all general terms are flatus vocus - breath of the
voice), or conventionalism, a view that arises, so far as I can tell,
with Locke.
In modern biological taxonomy, this is what I call species denial. A
species is just some handy tag we assign to organisms to help
communication between scientists. I have some sympathy for it,
although I reject it.
-- John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com "Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122 =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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