Adrian Currie writes...

So, um, I’m starting to wonder if us philosophers focusing so much on ‘scientific concepts’ hasn’t been a big fat waste of time?

Lots of philosophers of science (myself included) like to think that we’re doing “philosophy of science in practice” (there’s even a society – the conferences are fantastic). As such, our work is supposed to be in some sense close to what scientists actually do—tracking the process of science—compared to other approaches which, for instance, focus on scientific theories, or the products of scientific investigation. A common motivation for philosophical reflection in this context is the idea that our philosophical work matters for what scientists do. It’s a lovely idea. But I’ve always felt a bit uneasy about this… To what extent can this kind of philosophy really feed into scientific practice?

This worry solidified when I read Karen Kovaka’s thought-provoking paper Biological Individuality and Scientific Practice (Karen read a draft of this post, and had some helpful criticism – thanks!). She’s interested in what philosophers call the ‘biological individuality problem’. The problem is pretty simple: we don’t know which biological objects are the individuals. Are the set of cells which share my genome—the Adrian-cells—an individual, or is the combination of Adrian-cells and all of those microbes within me (which I can’t live without) an individual? Is an ant an individual, or is the anthill an individual, or both? And so on. (Alison McConwell has a nice introductory piece covering these issues, oh and Leonard also just discussed it…)

Why should we care about the biological individuality debate? A common motivation appeals to real-life scientific work. Having an account of biological individuals in hand will enable biologists to count things, or get past the biases generated from their paradigmatic examples. The thought seems to be that there’s some conceptual housework to be done, and that housework is prior to some successful science being done.

But Kovaka doesn’t think the housework is prior. She points out that the difficulties philosophers point to can be—in fact often are—solved perfectly well by scientists without their claiming just what an individual is, and moreover that having an account of ‘individual’ in hand often won’t solve scientists’ empirical problems. Kovaka makes the sensible suggestion that the relationship between individuality concepts and what scientists actually do is one of what she calls ‘sensitivity’: roughly, there’s a dynamic interplay between conceptual and empirical work.

Now, I suspect that her philosophical interlocutors don’t actually think that their housekeeping is prior to scientific work in the sense she describes (and thus might take her point and happily jettison the housekeeping motivation!), but I really like how the paper encourages us to think about what motivates the kind of conceptual work that philosophers of science sometimes do. If Kovaka is correct, and often scientists don’t need to resolve conceptual problems in order to do their empirical work, that is, conceptual housekeeping is not prior to good empirical work, then appealing to our capacity to do such housekeeping in justifying our philosophizing is problematic.

But reflecting on the use of certain concepts in paleobiology, I’m starting to wonder if we should take a more extreme position. Do scientists even use concepts in the sense we philosophers often talk about them?

To understand what on earth I might mean by this, I should start by telling you what I take a concept to be (for the purposes of this post). A concept carves up the world. A concept of x divides the xs from the not-xs. It is, in effect, a function from states of affairs to categories. A concept of biological individuality tells you what counts as a biological individual, and what doesn’t.

Now, this might strike you as a rather restrictive notion of ‘concept’ – and it is. But I think it’s pretty close to what philosophers seem to be worrying about when they have debates about scientific concepts (at least in philosophy of biology!). The specific set of concepts which I don’t see paleobiologists using are species concepts.

A species concept tells you what it takes for two critters to be part of the same species. I might say Super-Paw and Bailey (pictured below) are members of the same species because they have a unified ancestry, or because they are part of an interbreeding population, or because they have relevantly similar genomes, or so on. Like concepts of individuality, concepts of species are tricky. Many philosophers are pluralists about species concepts (they are about biological individuality too): there is not just one correct way of dividing species, but a group of ways, which are suitable for different tasks.