I am glad that you have corrected that (it's SNaRC, by the way). However, I am still bemused as to how to read Kirk's hypothesis. An explanation needs some sort of explicit or implict generalisation to motivate it. I for the life of me cannot see how species are explanatory hypotheses. I do not understand what that even means, and nothing you or Kirk have ever said makes a difference to my comprehension of it. This may be my limitation, but I suspect that philosophy takes these things in a different sense.
As to the D-N model not applying to historical objects that is not an obvious conclusion. As far back as William Dray's _Laws and Explanation in History_ (1957), which I read as an undergrad in 1980 [!], people have been supposing that historical generalisations are not "laws", but still function in explanations. In fact, since Cartwright's 1999 The Dappled World, even the classical laws notion of explanation has receded.
Finally, I do not "start" for the position that species are things to be discovered. That is the background assumption *of systematics* (just today I received a scan of the Proc Royal Linn Soc for 1935 where among others, J S Gilmour made that statement). I propose that speciesd are groups, not kinds (and Fitzhugh is not the target of that). But you then assert your conclusion as a starting point. This neither helps me nor is good argumentation (sorry).
Peircean abduction is not, in itself, a reason for adopting a hypothesis as correct or even viable. It is a process of inference to be sure, but not everything, even by Peirce's admission, is abduction, any more than Whewell's method of consilience is all there is, etc.
However, this is a bit of a fire hose, so I will address some bite sized chunks. In coming days.
My one question for now is why it is you think I say you cannot look at organisms? In my Understanding Species book, I have the following passage (p84):
> There are, says Professor Julia Sigwart, an American mollusc specialist (malacologist), species *makers* and species *users*. The former are the taxonomists, and they identify, name and record species in technical journals and store the *type specimens* (the original specimen that ‘bears’ the name) in museums and other collections. There are way too few of these. The latter – well, that includes everybody, according to Sigwart. She notes in her 2019 book *What Species Mean* (chapter 3) that looking out of her window she sees species of tree, animal, bird and other living things, and that this knowledge involves two main steps: knowing that something is different from other similar (or related) things; and giving it a unique name to communicate and identify it to other users, for the taxonomists are also users of species. Knowing and naming species are related activities, but not the same.
> Sigwart makes what, as a philosopher, I think is a minor mistake, although not one that causes science that much difficulty. She doesn’t see a species of hummingbird. She sees a bird, an organism, a *specimen*. A specimen is an example of a broader group, the species, but the relation between species and specimen is fraught. On the one hand, you cannot identify a species without the use of specimens, usually by looking at many of them to see a pattern, which is then called a species. On the other hand, without knowing the broader groups that specimen is a part of (Aves, or birds, the family Trochilidae, the genus *Calypte*) you cannot identify it as a specimen of an existing species (*Calypte anna*), nor as a specimen of a newly discovered species. In short, there is a reciprocal illumination from general knowledge to particular knowledge and back again.
Looking forward to engaging on this further. A species is not a thing that can be identified. We identify organisms. I understand what you mean when you say species are individuals - Snarky solutions. I have read what you and Mishler have written on this in drawing from Hempel's D-N explamation. To you, what is real is the law - regularity - and there is a regularity to organisms that are allied to their by genetic exchange and expression of traits.
But the reality is what is tied to perception of effects to which we retrodict to an antecedant cause. Hempel's D-N is about testing if laws as necessarily so, but biological creatures are not law bound to a regularity of causation. There are many relevant causes and you are missing the science of developmental biology that explains many (most) effects that a species taxon cannot address. This makes the regular view of causation applied to species taxa as things or entities misleading and a violation of Hempel's RTE.
I understand Hempel's DN and I understand your position. What I habe not seen is a demostration that you understand Kirk or Peirce's philosophy as it applies to this. The one sentence I have read on your published work's on Kirk's position was erroneous and immediately I was able to identify that you did not fully grasp it. The relevance of the Duhem-Quine thesis is also being missed in your analysis. That has me concerned.
In the pragmatics of doing conservation, working as a geneticist, programming statistical models from remote sense satellite data, telemetry home range analysis, and working closely with Indigenous communities and other scientists we are experiencing serious practical limitations in species as units or individuals theory. It is doing real damage and I hope to make it clear as to why this is the case.
I have been working on a paper for a while and Kirk has been helping. I am not as skilled at publishing, because I am bust running staff, dealing with government on Indugenous referrals, and providing technical support to elders and Keyoh holders. When we go into the forest we do not see species. We percieve effects. Inheritance, replication, environmental contingency on norm of reaction response in phenotypes, fixation, and heritabiliy are not general laws strung together to explain everything. There is law like regularity that our models pick up on, but historical science involves scale relevant contingency and the nature of testing is not the same as the DN model as used in physics experiments. I fully understand Hempel's philosophy as it applies to an explanation of a thermometer, but you are making an error in turning process based laws into things. There are biological processes but they are not laws. We use statistical models to inform theory with rules that are estimations. In your world, caribou herds and their mapped perimeters become the reality. In my world, the cow-calf mother that migrated surprisingly outside of the modeled expectation is where I seek answers to real effects, not the imagined nominalism.
Less: The one place where you comment on Fitzhugh in your publications, you get it wrong. In your SNaRC paper, you state: "Some (Fitzhugh 2005, 2009) even think that delineating taxa such as species are explanations in themselves." Kirk would never say this. I am concerned that you do not understand his position and the role of Peirce's abduction in rational thought. Your cited quote gives a clue to how you see the problem: "themselves." Species have no selves because they are explanatory hypotheses, but you start from that position that species are things to be discovered. Put that aside for the moment and just reason that organisms exhibit effects where ecological and evolutionary theory can provide causal closure without need for a second entity or unit hovering over top of it that you pre-identify as a species. Hempel DN applies to laws, not historical testing on scale-dependent contingency. Species as regularity causation applied to groups as real things or units is a violation of vera causa and Peirce's abduction informs us on the relevance of our primary observations into effects (organisms, their properties, time, and location) to infer their causes prior to moving onto the stages of testing. I am reading Quine "From stimulus to Science" this morning - a short book.
Explain to me the causal mechanisms that a species as individual can instigate? Where do I point my finger at to demonstrate species mechanisms to others? How do species as individuals instigate mechanisms? How do you address examples such as the creosote rat populations that must eat the fecal biome in the overlapping geography to acquire the ability to eat the creosote bush? The species-organism dualism you propose includes the tangible organism and this imagined beast that baffles my thinking when it comes to causality. Thirty years of reading this stuff - Ghiselin, Hull, Sober, your work - and I even took a course on the philosophy of biology from Dr. Ereshefsky back in my graduate study days doing phylogeographic research in conversations with John Avise and Alan Templeton on my thinking about cohesion species -back in the day when I thought this all made sense.
"Mechanisms are composed of both entities (with their properties) and activities. Activities are the producers of change. Entities are the things that engage in activities. Activities usually require that entities have specific types of properties. The neurotransmitter and receptor, two entities, bind, an activity, by virtue of their structural properties and charge distributions. A DNA base and a complementary base hydrogen bond because of their geometric structures and weak charges. The organization of these entities and activities determines the ways in which they produce the phenomenon. Entities often must be appropriately located, structured, and oriented, and the activities in which they engage must have a temporal order, rate, and duration. For example, two neurons must be spatially proximate for diffusion of the neurotransmitter [...] If a mechanism is represented schematically by A-> B-> C, then the continuity lies in the arrows and their explication is in terms of the activities that the arrows represent. A missing arrow, namely, the inability to specify an activity, leaves an explanatory gap in the productive continuity of the mechanism". https://www.jstor.org/stable/188611
Your approach goes from A - the organism and its properties to skip over to Z - the presumed to exist species as an entity. Species have no activity, because they do not have limbs or the physiological system to activate. Organisms have those traits. Your approach skips over the total relevant evidence to support your idea that species are the things replacing what organisms can do in reality - such as be involved in activities.
“I desire to point out,” says Peirce, “that it is by taking advantage of the idea of continuity, of the passage from one form to another by insensible degrees, that the naturalist builds his conceptions” (Peirce, CP 2.646).
I just finished a meeting with elders and federal caribou recovery teams. These topics are being raised. The Indigenous peoples have things to teach us about these ideas as they relate to relations with organisms. A serious problem with your view is that it subtracts and generalizes in a way that puts real things at risk. The people can go out into the land and perceive threats and reason out the risks involved. But they are told what to ignore, just focus on the species at risk. It kills inquiry. Species maps, critical habitat priority areas, and protectionist planning will produce very little progress without stewardship. When I step into a forest and I am holing onto a map of critical caribou habitat, what am I going to be looking at? I will have a map on the likelihood that a caribou referenced by the species (Rangifer tarandus) will use the habitat.
Species distribution models explain the effects. The effects are the records on organisms (lat/long - pixel = present) used in the models and their correlations (pure analytical reasoning) with explanatory variables. As Sokal and Rohlf made clear in Biometry, the left side of the statistical equation is the dependent variables (the effects) and the right of the equation is the independent variables (the causes). However, SDM's sample explanatory variables where organisms were undetected and most often just sample the explanatory variables randomly within range of a presence point. There is much to discuss on the philosophy of SDMs, which I am working on in doing the programming, implementing the results into recovery planning, and working with Indigenous communities, government biologists, and other scientists for the utility in implementation plans on recovery.
But when I am walking in the mountains with my predictive map on caribou, is that what I see? No! I see the trees, mushrooms, huckleberries, mosquitoes, toads, streams, bogs, fens, and my mind starts to stratify it all up from my background theory. Food webs inform my thinking. What I am not carrying with me is a predictive map on any of the other creatures, but just a map on caribou. A map serves a purpose to navigate our inquiry - it is an inductive stage of study that looks into the probabilities of effects deduced from the cause. Someone has made caribou the priority, but that inference was achieved from sampling at a different time and place. They listed the species as though it could be tagged and targeted like any other entity. It results in organisms never observed, witnessed, and in Indigenous lands to receive their mark on them that they are to be listed as determined by a biologist thinking that species are things that need to be protected.
I contrast that against turning this back into focus on the objective, which is to prioritize scientific inquiry. Reawaken the inquisitivity in others and make their ideas relevant. A community of knowledge means that others must have a place to share their ideas. The problem is that nobody can see a species at risk, because it is not a thing or entity that they can point at and it is not a living beast that can be put at risk. Real beasts are being put at risk, such as the fish, caribou, and frogs that we observed in the harvesting areas that were being killed. An environment cannot be harmed, or we might be putting protective shields around the moon to prevent further harm to its surface. Harm requires a physiology, including a sensory-nervous / autopoetic system and I am more than willing to concede that this may be a fundamental trait of all living creatures (Fritjof Capra is a good author)..
My understanding into risk comes from direct and primary observation. I observed the things that were being harmed - toads buried into dust, tadpoles dried out, toads squished on the road in forest harvest areas. These are effects to which I adduce the cause and can reason out from there to stages of testing. As a scientist I am hard pressed to communicate and direct the priorities onto the threats, but instead am being directed to follow in search of species at risk that are things entered into some rescue plan. It tells First Nations that they do not know the risk, because they do not know the species at risk. Divert your attention away from those things you see, because they are common and irrelevant to focus attention onto the creatures that are flagged here from afar according to some conclusion contrived by abduction - a guess with no guarantee. So the guess is the priority and I am told to ignore my very own powers of reason and shelve them from further discussion to only report on these priorities. It neuters the joy of being able to reason and it disempowers those who are knowledge holders with a history of communications about the creatures they have known. Try to get to know a species and you will find yourself confused, but I know of elders who tell me that they talk to the grizzly bears. I also personally know a few toads that I have managed to recapture over the years of sampling.
I think you have yet to explain an understanding of the relationship between Peirce and Fitzhugh. I am reading that you are trying to explain a position that I have already seen in your writings with Mishler (Mishler, B.D. & Wilkins J.S. 2018. The hunting of the SNaRC: a snarky solution to the species problem. Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 10: 1–18). You are suggesting that species are the things that need to be explained, so we can ignore the toad in the childs hand. In no other branch of science do we have one effect (the individual before us) and duplicate into another effect (the species beyond our reach) to explain the primary observation by some cause of the latter piece of theory in answer to the former. It is a busy piece of logic that invents something new into the equation and I will stick to the creatures that I know, their phenotypes, their development, their relations, and will use species as an explanatory hypotheses concerning some events in history whereby a population became isolated, new traits became heritable, fixed, and naturally preserved in a ancestor-descendant chain to the present day observation. I think you have seriously misunderstood, overlooked, and not explained Kirk's position on the role of abduction.
The more I read your recent post, the more I am convinced that you are making a series of conceptual mistakes that makes things highly problematic for my profession in conservation science. Species are relevant to the work that we do in conservation, but the view that you are presenting is nominalism. It is a position that I cannot get behind and I would classify it as metaphysics led astray, not to be rude - but science must be brutal and refute ideas in disvourse. This evening I re-read Hempel on explanation, just to get a good recap:
Description of the effect: plural: explananda; singular: explanandum
The explanandum is the sentence that describes the phenomenon to be explained. The explanans is the class of sentences adduced from observation or perception of the phenomenon, or the hypothesis. The explanans has two subclasses of sentences that include statements on antecedant conditions and a set of statements on general laws or statistical probability. The laws assert general and unexceptional connnections between specified characteristics of events - causal or deterministic (Hempel). "Explanation essentially consists in the offering of a hypothesis of fact [explanans], standing to the fact to be explained as case of antecedent to case of consequent of some already known law of connection" (Ducasse) The hypothesis refers to a fact or a phenomena. Facts are things or processes in things, whereas a phenomenon is the perception of events involving facts.
You view taxa as the summation of regularity in this world - such as replicate copies of DNA that require explanation. In your view, it is not the things in themselves that need to be explained, such as DNA, organisms, or traits of organisms but the regularity of things; a call to the regularity view of causation. You are not interested in the billiard balls, but in gravity, friction, mass, acceleration, and force. Your explanation as to why the ball moved is only the cause without the effect. You are interested in the foil and not the fact.
You state: "On the broader scale of explanations, the point remains. We get the data, and we analyse it to get the phenomena. Then we explain it".
The only phenomena you will get at from analyzing the data is analytical. The data is collected and entered systematically into a database. Statistical inductive methods (e.g., probability models) are used to assist in the search of effects deduced from the hypothesis. Models inform theories. What is being explained?
A phenomenon is an observable event through the senses - reasoning by abduction - from the effect (a material thing) that causes the memory. The explanans are the observation statements in inference to the cause of the effect; in this example, effect (E = the explanandum, or the sentence about the phenomenon to be explained) and the explanans together explain the fact or phenomenon. If we have any understanding at all, it must be causal in nature.
Your analyzing to "get the phenomena" may be clarified in Josephson (2000) smart inductive generalizations are abductions paper:
"A generalization helps to explain some characteristics of the set of observations of the instances, but it does not explain the instances themselves. That the cloudless, daytime sky is blue helps explain why, when I look up, I see the sky to be blue, but it doesn't explain why the sky is blue. Seen this way, an inductive generalization does indeed have the form of an inference whose conclusion explains its premises."
"The frequencies in the larger population, together with the frequency relevant characteristics of the method for drawing a sample, explain the frequencies in the observed sample. [...] In general, the explanation explains why the sample frequency was the way it was, rather than having some markedly different value. If there is a deviation in the sample from what you would expect, given the population and the sampling method, then you have to throw some Chance into the explanation (which is more or less plausible depending on how much Chance you have to suppose)" (Josephson 2000: 10.1007/978-94-017-0606-3_2)
This fits with Peirce:
‘Abduction... is any reasoning of a large class of which the provisional adoption of an explanatory hypothesis is the type’ (Peirce 1933b: 541), and ‘Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its only justification is that if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way’ (Peirce 1934: 145).
You state: "I have, though, noted that scientific disciplines gain, through historical accident and misunderstandings often, new meanings to core concepts like explanation and hypothesis."
How new is new? Like Peirce new, or Popper new, or those who knew the new, knew the newer hypothesis?
Abduction results in the acquisition of a sentence that we call hypothesis.
Abductive Argument Structure
Major Premise (Rule): If A were true, then C would follow as a matter of course.
(General rule or law-like assumption)
Minor Premise (Result): But C is observed.
(Surprising fact, phenomenon, or effect)
Conclusion (Hypothesis): Therefore, A might be true.
(Best explanation, suggested hypothesis)
The evidence of an argument is interogatted through the structure of the premise (major and minor).
E (the explanandum - the sentence describing the phenomenon to be explained): Explanans (L (Cause - laws, tendency, or generalizations), C (Background antecedant conditions)) => P (The phenomena observed)
How are phenomena explained, the explandum has in its sentences the explanans that consists of L and C that predict or estimate P. "The hypothesis helps us to formulate an explicans [=explanans] from which the explicandum can be deduced; secondly it suggests to us a number of independent tests" (Popper). The explanans is the hypothesis - inference to cause from an effect.
Description of the effect: plural: explananda; singular: explanandum
E or P is: The observed traits or distributions of organisms (i.e., the phenomena being classified or named).
If taxa are summaries of information that call for explanation, then you are saying that it is the theory or model that calls for explanation?
You state "such things as common descent, shared ancestral developmental systems, ecological niches and trophic webs give the explanantia", but those are not things. Those are hypotheses or theories and not material things in the world.
You state "an explanation explains regularities in the world" <- regularity view of causation, looking for laws or generalities.
You state "But what is required first of all, is an idea that there even are such phenomena as genetic regularity, regular interbreeding, etc" <- this is odd, because genetic regularity and interbreeding are not phenomena. We do not observe genetic regularity, but we observe replicate copies of DNA sequences. I think you are trying to say that the patterns are what we are trying to explain and the taxon is the summary of information that shows the pattern? It seems highly convoluted and skips past the obvious that the material things we witness are individual organisms that have their properties. It is the effects that we seek to explain and we understand such effects by knowing the cause.
Great to see the "if" in your statement, but the idea again walks us away from our primary data (perception of organisms) to an wonderfully imagined story: "...if species do exist, they are homeostatic processes (see the essays in Duprè and Nicholson 2018)", but what do you mean by exist here? Are you thinking of Richard Boyd’s (1990; 1991; 1999a; 2000) Homeostatic Property Clusters theory (HPC for short) as natural kinds? Species as homeostatic processes is a far leap from organisms:
"Organisms are entities which have the capacity of self-maintenance stabilization. In the sense that very specific thermodynamic and self- and biochemical processes are required for their maintenance, living systems-organisms- are highly improbable. The specific conditions governing each internal process are provided by preceding processes within the system. Consequently a network of interaction exists which constitutes closed system. This circular interaction a circularly of the elements of the system guarantees the continued existence of each element, or process, through its necessary participation in the production elements. and maintenance of all other Such a system has been termed autopoietic"
Thanks for the bite size!
I am glad that you have corrected that (it's SNaRC, by the way). However, I am still bemused as to how to read Kirk's hypothesis. An explanation needs some sort of explicit or implict generalisation to motivate it. I for the life of me cannot see how species are explanatory hypotheses. I do not understand what that even means, and nothing you or Kirk have ever said makes a difference to my comprehension of it. This may be my limitation, but I suspect that philosophy takes these things in a different sense.
As to the D-N model not applying to historical objects that is not an obvious conclusion. As far back as William Dray's _Laws and Explanation in History_ (1957), which I read as an undergrad in 1980 [!], people have been supposing that historical generalisations are not "laws", but still function in explanations. In fact, since Cartwright's 1999 The Dappled World, even the classical laws notion of explanation has receded.
Finally, I do not "start" for the position that species are things to be discovered. That is the background assumption *of systematics* (just today I received a scan of the Proc Royal Linn Soc for 1935 where among others, J S Gilmour made that statement). I propose that speciesd are groups, not kinds (and Fitzhugh is not the target of that). But you then assert your conclusion as a starting point. This neither helps me nor is good argumentation (sorry).
Peircean abduction is not, in itself, a reason for adopting a hypothesis as correct or even viable. It is a process of inference to be sure, but not everything, even by Peirce's admission, is abduction, any more than Whewell's method of consilience is all there is, etc.
Enjoy Quine. He is one of my faves too.
Mark, thanks for posting these here.
However, this is a bit of a fire hose, so I will address some bite sized chunks. In coming days.
My one question for now is why it is you think I say you cannot look at organisms? In my Understanding Species book, I have the following passage (p84):
> There are, says Professor Julia Sigwart, an American mollusc specialist (malacologist), species *makers* and species *users*. The former are the taxonomists, and they identify, name and record species in technical journals and store the *type specimens* (the original specimen that ‘bears’ the name) in museums and other collections. There are way too few of these. The latter – well, that includes everybody, according to Sigwart. She notes in her 2019 book *What Species Mean* (chapter 3) that looking out of her window she sees species of tree, animal, bird and other living things, and that this knowledge involves two main steps: knowing that something is different from other similar (or related) things; and giving it a unique name to communicate and identify it to other users, for the taxonomists are also users of species. Knowing and naming species are related activities, but not the same.
> Sigwart makes what, as a philosopher, I think is a minor mistake, although not one that causes science that much difficulty. She doesn’t see a species of hummingbird. She sees a bird, an organism, a *specimen*. A specimen is an example of a broader group, the species, but the relation between species and specimen is fraught. On the one hand, you cannot identify a species without the use of specimens, usually by looking at many of them to see a pattern, which is then called a species. On the other hand, without knowing the broader groups that specimen is a part of (Aves, or birds, the family Trochilidae, the genus *Calypte*) you cannot identify it as a specimen of an existing species (*Calypte anna*), nor as a specimen of a newly discovered species. In short, there is a reciprocal illumination from general knowledge to particular knowledge and back again.
Looking forward to engaging on this further. A species is not a thing that can be identified. We identify organisms. I understand what you mean when you say species are individuals - Snarky solutions. I have read what you and Mishler have written on this in drawing from Hempel's D-N explamation. To you, what is real is the law - regularity - and there is a regularity to organisms that are allied to their by genetic exchange and expression of traits.
But the reality is what is tied to perception of effects to which we retrodict to an antecedant cause. Hempel's D-N is about testing if laws as necessarily so, but biological creatures are not law bound to a regularity of causation. There are many relevant causes and you are missing the science of developmental biology that explains many (most) effects that a species taxon cannot address. This makes the regular view of causation applied to species taxa as things or entities misleading and a violation of Hempel's RTE.
I understand Hempel's DN and I understand your position. What I habe not seen is a demostration that you understand Kirk or Peirce's philosophy as it applies to this. The one sentence I have read on your published work's on Kirk's position was erroneous and immediately I was able to identify that you did not fully grasp it. The relevance of the Duhem-Quine thesis is also being missed in your analysis. That has me concerned.
In the pragmatics of doing conservation, working as a geneticist, programming statistical models from remote sense satellite data, telemetry home range analysis, and working closely with Indigenous communities and other scientists we are experiencing serious practical limitations in species as units or individuals theory. It is doing real damage and I hope to make it clear as to why this is the case.
I have been working on a paper for a while and Kirk has been helping. I am not as skilled at publishing, because I am bust running staff, dealing with government on Indugenous referrals, and providing technical support to elders and Keyoh holders. When we go into the forest we do not see species. We percieve effects. Inheritance, replication, environmental contingency on norm of reaction response in phenotypes, fixation, and heritabiliy are not general laws strung together to explain everything. There is law like regularity that our models pick up on, but historical science involves scale relevant contingency and the nature of testing is not the same as the DN model as used in physics experiments. I fully understand Hempel's philosophy as it applies to an explanation of a thermometer, but you are making an error in turning process based laws into things. There are biological processes but they are not laws. We use statistical models to inform theory with rules that are estimations. In your world, caribou herds and their mapped perimeters become the reality. In my world, the cow-calf mother that migrated surprisingly outside of the modeled expectation is where I seek answers to real effects, not the imagined nominalism.
More fire hose, Mark. Say less.
Less: The one place where you comment on Fitzhugh in your publications, you get it wrong. In your SNaRC paper, you state: "Some (Fitzhugh 2005, 2009) even think that delineating taxa such as species are explanations in themselves." Kirk would never say this. I am concerned that you do not understand his position and the role of Peirce's abduction in rational thought. Your cited quote gives a clue to how you see the problem: "themselves." Species have no selves because they are explanatory hypotheses, but you start from that position that species are things to be discovered. Put that aside for the moment and just reason that organisms exhibit effects where ecological and evolutionary theory can provide causal closure without need for a second entity or unit hovering over top of it that you pre-identify as a species. Hempel DN applies to laws, not historical testing on scale-dependent contingency. Species as regularity causation applied to groups as real things or units is a violation of vera causa and Peirce's abduction informs us on the relevance of our primary observations into effects (organisms, their properties, time, and location) to infer their causes prior to moving onto the stages of testing. I am reading Quine "From stimulus to Science" this morning - a short book.
Explain to me the causal mechanisms that a species as individual can instigate? Where do I point my finger at to demonstrate species mechanisms to others? How do species as individuals instigate mechanisms? How do you address examples such as the creosote rat populations that must eat the fecal biome in the overlapping geography to acquire the ability to eat the creosote bush? The species-organism dualism you propose includes the tangible organism and this imagined beast that baffles my thinking when it comes to causality. Thirty years of reading this stuff - Ghiselin, Hull, Sober, your work - and I even took a course on the philosophy of biology from Dr. Ereshefsky back in my graduate study days doing phylogeographic research in conversations with John Avise and Alan Templeton on my thinking about cohesion species -back in the day when I thought this all made sense.
"Mechanisms are composed of both entities (with their properties) and activities. Activities are the producers of change. Entities are the things that engage in activities. Activities usually require that entities have specific types of properties. The neurotransmitter and receptor, two entities, bind, an activity, by virtue of their structural properties and charge distributions. A DNA base and a complementary base hydrogen bond because of their geometric structures and weak charges. The organization of these entities and activities determines the ways in which they produce the phenomenon. Entities often must be appropriately located, structured, and oriented, and the activities in which they engage must have a temporal order, rate, and duration. For example, two neurons must be spatially proximate for diffusion of the neurotransmitter [...] If a mechanism is represented schematically by A-> B-> C, then the continuity lies in the arrows and their explication is in terms of the activities that the arrows represent. A missing arrow, namely, the inability to specify an activity, leaves an explanatory gap in the productive continuity of the mechanism". https://www.jstor.org/stable/188611
Your approach goes from A - the organism and its properties to skip over to Z - the presumed to exist species as an entity. Species have no activity, because they do not have limbs or the physiological system to activate. Organisms have those traits. Your approach skips over the total relevant evidence to support your idea that species are the things replacing what organisms can do in reality - such as be involved in activities.
“I desire to point out,” says Peirce, “that it is by taking advantage of the idea of continuity, of the passage from one form to another by insensible degrees, that the naturalist builds his conceptions” (Peirce, CP 2.646).
I just finished a meeting with elders and federal caribou recovery teams. These topics are being raised. The Indigenous peoples have things to teach us about these ideas as they relate to relations with organisms. A serious problem with your view is that it subtracts and generalizes in a way that puts real things at risk. The people can go out into the land and perceive threats and reason out the risks involved. But they are told what to ignore, just focus on the species at risk. It kills inquiry. Species maps, critical habitat priority areas, and protectionist planning will produce very little progress without stewardship. When I step into a forest and I am holing onto a map of critical caribou habitat, what am I going to be looking at? I will have a map on the likelihood that a caribou referenced by the species (Rangifer tarandus) will use the habitat.
Species distribution models explain the effects. The effects are the records on organisms (lat/long - pixel = present) used in the models and their correlations (pure analytical reasoning) with explanatory variables. As Sokal and Rohlf made clear in Biometry, the left side of the statistical equation is the dependent variables (the effects) and the right of the equation is the independent variables (the causes). However, SDM's sample explanatory variables where organisms were undetected and most often just sample the explanatory variables randomly within range of a presence point. There is much to discuss on the philosophy of SDMs, which I am working on in doing the programming, implementing the results into recovery planning, and working with Indigenous communities, government biologists, and other scientists for the utility in implementation plans on recovery.
But when I am walking in the mountains with my predictive map on caribou, is that what I see? No! I see the trees, mushrooms, huckleberries, mosquitoes, toads, streams, bogs, fens, and my mind starts to stratify it all up from my background theory. Food webs inform my thinking. What I am not carrying with me is a predictive map on any of the other creatures, but just a map on caribou. A map serves a purpose to navigate our inquiry - it is an inductive stage of study that looks into the probabilities of effects deduced from the cause. Someone has made caribou the priority, but that inference was achieved from sampling at a different time and place. They listed the species as though it could be tagged and targeted like any other entity. It results in organisms never observed, witnessed, and in Indigenous lands to receive their mark on them that they are to be listed as determined by a biologist thinking that species are things that need to be protected.
I contrast that against turning this back into focus on the objective, which is to prioritize scientific inquiry. Reawaken the inquisitivity in others and make their ideas relevant. A community of knowledge means that others must have a place to share their ideas. The problem is that nobody can see a species at risk, because it is not a thing or entity that they can point at and it is not a living beast that can be put at risk. Real beasts are being put at risk, such as the fish, caribou, and frogs that we observed in the harvesting areas that were being killed. An environment cannot be harmed, or we might be putting protective shields around the moon to prevent further harm to its surface. Harm requires a physiology, including a sensory-nervous / autopoetic system and I am more than willing to concede that this may be a fundamental trait of all living creatures (Fritjof Capra is a good author)..
My understanding into risk comes from direct and primary observation. I observed the things that were being harmed - toads buried into dust, tadpoles dried out, toads squished on the road in forest harvest areas. These are effects to which I adduce the cause and can reason out from there to stages of testing. As a scientist I am hard pressed to communicate and direct the priorities onto the threats, but instead am being directed to follow in search of species at risk that are things entered into some rescue plan. It tells First Nations that they do not know the risk, because they do not know the species at risk. Divert your attention away from those things you see, because they are common and irrelevant to focus attention onto the creatures that are flagged here from afar according to some conclusion contrived by abduction - a guess with no guarantee. So the guess is the priority and I am told to ignore my very own powers of reason and shelve them from further discussion to only report on these priorities. It neuters the joy of being able to reason and it disempowers those who are knowledge holders with a history of communications about the creatures they have known. Try to get to know a species and you will find yourself confused, but I know of elders who tell me that they talk to the grizzly bears. I also personally know a few toads that I have managed to recapture over the years of sampling.
I think you have yet to explain an understanding of the relationship between Peirce and Fitzhugh. I am reading that you are trying to explain a position that I have already seen in your writings with Mishler (Mishler, B.D. & Wilkins J.S. 2018. The hunting of the SNaRC: a snarky solution to the species problem. Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 10: 1–18). You are suggesting that species are the things that need to be explained, so we can ignore the toad in the childs hand. In no other branch of science do we have one effect (the individual before us) and duplicate into another effect (the species beyond our reach) to explain the primary observation by some cause of the latter piece of theory in answer to the former. It is a busy piece of logic that invents something new into the equation and I will stick to the creatures that I know, their phenotypes, their development, their relations, and will use species as an explanatory hypotheses concerning some events in history whereby a population became isolated, new traits became heritable, fixed, and naturally preserved in a ancestor-descendant chain to the present day observation. I think you have seriously misunderstood, overlooked, and not explained Kirk's position on the role of abduction.
The more I read your recent post, the more I am convinced that you are making a series of conceptual mistakes that makes things highly problematic for my profession in conservation science. Species are relevant to the work that we do in conservation, but the view that you are presenting is nominalism. It is a position that I cannot get behind and I would classify it as metaphysics led astray, not to be rude - but science must be brutal and refute ideas in disvourse. This evening I re-read Hempel on explanation, just to get a good recap:
Description of the effect: plural: explananda; singular: explanandum
Hypothesis: plural: explanantia; singular: explanans
The explanandum is the sentence that describes the phenomenon to be explained. The explanans is the class of sentences adduced from observation or perception of the phenomenon, or the hypothesis. The explanans has two subclasses of sentences that include statements on antecedant conditions and a set of statements on general laws or statistical probability. The laws assert general and unexceptional connnections between specified characteristics of events - causal or deterministic (Hempel). "Explanation essentially consists in the offering of a hypothesis of fact [explanans], standing to the fact to be explained as case of antecedent to case of consequent of some already known law of connection" (Ducasse) The hypothesis refers to a fact or a phenomena. Facts are things or processes in things, whereas a phenomenon is the perception of events involving facts.
You view taxa as the summation of regularity in this world - such as replicate copies of DNA that require explanation. In your view, it is not the things in themselves that need to be explained, such as DNA, organisms, or traits of organisms but the regularity of things; a call to the regularity view of causation. You are not interested in the billiard balls, but in gravity, friction, mass, acceleration, and force. Your explanation as to why the ball moved is only the cause without the effect. You are interested in the foil and not the fact.
You state: "On the broader scale of explanations, the point remains. We get the data, and we analyse it to get the phenomena. Then we explain it".
The only phenomena you will get at from analyzing the data is analytical. The data is collected and entered systematically into a database. Statistical inductive methods (e.g., probability models) are used to assist in the search of effects deduced from the hypothesis. Models inform theories. What is being explained?
A phenomenon is an observable event through the senses - reasoning by abduction - from the effect (a material thing) that causes the memory. The explanans are the observation statements in inference to the cause of the effect; in this example, effect (E = the explanandum, or the sentence about the phenomenon to be explained) and the explanans together explain the fact or phenomenon. If we have any understanding at all, it must be causal in nature.
Your analyzing to "get the phenomena" may be clarified in Josephson (2000) smart inductive generalizations are abductions paper:
"A generalization helps to explain some characteristics of the set of observations of the instances, but it does not explain the instances themselves. That the cloudless, daytime sky is blue helps explain why, when I look up, I see the sky to be blue, but it doesn't explain why the sky is blue. Seen this way, an inductive generalization does indeed have the form of an inference whose conclusion explains its premises."
"The frequencies in the larger population, together with the frequency relevant characteristics of the method for drawing a sample, explain the frequencies in the observed sample. [...] In general, the explanation explains why the sample frequency was the way it was, rather than having some markedly different value. If there is a deviation in the sample from what you would expect, given the population and the sampling method, then you have to throw some Chance into the explanation (which is more or less plausible depending on how much Chance you have to suppose)" (Josephson 2000: 10.1007/978-94-017-0606-3_2)
This fits with Peirce:
‘Abduction... is any reasoning of a large class of which the provisional adoption of an explanatory hypothesis is the type’ (Peirce 1933b: 541), and ‘Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its only justification is that if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way’ (Peirce 1934: 145).
You state: "I have, though, noted that scientific disciplines gain, through historical accident and misunderstandings often, new meanings to core concepts like explanation and hypothesis."
How new is new? Like Peirce new, or Popper new, or those who knew the new, knew the newer hypothesis?
Abduction results in the acquisition of a sentence that we call hypothesis.
Abductive Argument Structure
Major Premise (Rule): If A were true, then C would follow as a matter of course.
(General rule or law-like assumption)
Minor Premise (Result): But C is observed.
(Surprising fact, phenomenon, or effect)
Conclusion (Hypothesis): Therefore, A might be true.
(Best explanation, suggested hypothesis)
The evidence of an argument is interogatted through the structure of the premise (major and minor).
E (the explanandum - the sentence describing the phenomenon to be explained): Explanans (L (Cause - laws, tendency, or generalizations), C (Background antecedant conditions)) => P (The phenomena observed)
How are phenomena explained, the explandum has in its sentences the explanans that consists of L and C that predict or estimate P. "The hypothesis helps us to formulate an explicans [=explanans] from which the explicandum can be deduced; secondly it suggests to us a number of independent tests" (Popper). The explanans is the hypothesis - inference to cause from an effect.
Description of the effect: plural: explananda; singular: explanandum
Hypothesis: plural: explanantia; singular: explanans
E or P is: The observed traits or distributions of organisms (i.e., the phenomena being classified or named).
If taxa are summaries of information that call for explanation, then you are saying that it is the theory or model that calls for explanation?
You state "such things as common descent, shared ancestral developmental systems, ecological niches and trophic webs give the explanantia", but those are not things. Those are hypotheses or theories and not material things in the world.
You state "an explanation explains regularities in the world" <- regularity view of causation, looking for laws or generalities.
You state "But what is required first of all, is an idea that there even are such phenomena as genetic regularity, regular interbreeding, etc" <- this is odd, because genetic regularity and interbreeding are not phenomena. We do not observe genetic regularity, but we observe replicate copies of DNA sequences. I think you are trying to say that the patterns are what we are trying to explain and the taxon is the summary of information that shows the pattern? It seems highly convoluted and skips past the obvious that the material things we witness are individual organisms that have their properties. It is the effects that we seek to explain and we understand such effects by knowing the cause.
Great to see the "if" in your statement, but the idea again walks us away from our primary data (perception of organisms) to an wonderfully imagined story: "...if species do exist, they are homeostatic processes (see the essays in Duprè and Nicholson 2018)", but what do you mean by exist here? Are you thinking of Richard Boyd’s (1990; 1991; 1999a; 2000) Homeostatic Property Clusters theory (HPC for short) as natural kinds? Species as homeostatic processes is a far leap from organisms:
"Organisms are entities which have the capacity of self-maintenance stabilization. In the sense that very specific thermodynamic and self- and biochemical processes are required for their maintenance, living systems-organisms- are highly improbable. The specific conditions governing each internal process are provided by preceding processes within the system. Consequently a network of interaction exists which constitutes closed system. This circular interaction a circularly of the elements of the system guarantees the continued existence of each element, or process, through its necessary participation in the production elements. and maintenance of all other Such a system has been termed autopoietic"