•  248
    One potentially extremely fruitful use of the tools of corpus analysis in the philosophy of science is to help us understand disputed terrains within the sciences that we study. For philosophers of biology, for instance, few controversies are as heated as those over the concepts we use in taxonomy to classify the living world, with the definition of ‘species’ perhaps most fundamental among them. As many understandings of biodiversity, in turn, involve counting the number of species present in a …Read more
  •  193
    The public relevance of philosophy
    with Olivier Lemeire and Pei-Shan Chi
    Synthese 200 (1): 1-28. 2022.
    Various authors have recently expressed doubts about the public relevance of philosophy. These doubts target both academic philosophy in general and particular subfields of philosophy. This paper investigates whether these doubts are justified through two tests in which the lack of public relevance of a philosophical paper is operationalized as the degree to which that paper is isolated. Both tests suggest that academic philosophy in general is more isolated from the broader public than it shoul…Read more
  •  83
    Against natural kind eliminativism
    with Pei-Shan Chi
    Synthese 198 (9): 8999-9020. 2020.
    It has recently been argued that the concept of natural kinds should be eliminated because it does not play a productive theoretical role and even harms philosophical research on scientific classification. We argue that this justification for eliminativism fails because the notion of ‘natural kinds’ plays another epistemic role in philosophical research, namely, it enables fruitful investigation into non-arbitrary classification. It does this in two ways: first, by providing a fruitful investiga…Read more
  •  49
    Radical pluralism, classificatory norms and the legitimacy of species classifications
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 73 27-34. 2019.
    Moderate pluralism is a popular position in contemporary philosophy of biology. Despite its popularity, various authors have argued that it tends to slide off off into a radical form of pluralism that is both normatively and descriptively ueptable. This paper looks at at the case of biological species classification, and evaluates a popular way of avoiding radical pluralism by relying on the shared aims and norms of a discipline. The main contention is that while these aims and norms may play a…Read more
  •  37
    The main claim of this thesis is that value-judgments should play a profound role in the construction and evaluation of species classifications. The arguments for this claim will be presented over the course of five chapters. These are divided into two main parts; part one, which consists of the two first chapters, presents an argument for a radical form of species pluralism; part two, which comprises the remaining chapters, discusses the implications of radical species pluralism for the role of…Read more
  •  35
    Integrative taxonomy and the operationalization of evolutionary independence
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3): 587-603. 2018.
    There is growing agreement among taxonomists that species are independently evolving lineages. The central notion of this conception, evolutionary independence, is commonly operationalized by taxonomists in multiple, diverging ways. This leads to a problem of operationalization-dependency in species classification, as species delimitation is not only dependent on the properties of the investigated groups, but also on how taxonomists choose to operationalize evolutionary independence. The questio…Read more
  •  31
    Taxonomy and conservation science: interdependent and value-laden
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 41 (2): 15. 2019.
    The relation between conservation science and taxonomy is typically seen as a simple dependency of the former on the latter. This dependency is assumed to be strictly one-way to avoid normative concerns from conservation science inappropriately affecting the descriptive discipline of taxonomy. In this paper, I argue against this widely assumed standard view on the relation between these two disciplines by highlighting two important roles for conservation scientists in scientific decisions that a…Read more
  •  30
    Enzyme classification and the entanglement of values and epistemic standards
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 84 37-45. 2020.
    This paper investigates the case of enzyme classification to evaluate different ideals for regulating values in science. I show that epistemic and non-epistemic considerations are inevitably and untraceably entangled in enzyme classification, and argue that this has significant implications for the two main kinds of views on values in science, namely, Epistemic Priority Views and Joint Satisfaction Views. More precisely, I argue that the case of enzyme classification poses a problem for the usab…Read more
  •  26
    A recent controversy about neural networks allegedly capable of detecting a person’s sexual orientation raises the question of whether all research on homosexuality should be permitted. This paper considers two arguments for limits to such research, and concludes that there are good reasons to limit at least the dissemination of applied research on the etiology of homosexuality. The paper then briefly sketches how this could work, and looks at three objections against these limitations.
  •  24
    Principles for creating a single authoritative list of the world’s species
    with Stephen Garnett, Les Christidis, Mark J. Costello, Frank E. Zachos, Olaf S. Bánki, Yiming Bao, Saroj K. Barik, John S. Buckeridge, Donald Hobern, Aaron Lien, Narelle Montgomery, Svetlana Nikolaeva, Richard L. Pyle, Scott A. Thomson, Peter Paul van Dijk, Anthony Whalen, Zhi-Qiang Zhang, and Kevin R. Thiele
    PLoS Biology 18 (7). 2020.
    Lists of species underpin many fields of human endeavour, but there are currently no universally accepted principles for deciding which biological species should be accepted when there are alternative taxonomic treatments (and, by extension, which scientific names should be applied to those species). As improvements in information technology make it easier to communicate, access, and aggregate biodiversity information, there is a need for a framework that helps taxonomists and the users of taxon…Read more
  •  21
    Values, regulation, and species delimitation
    Zootaxa 4415 (2): 390-392. 2018.
    Garnett and Christidis (2017) [hereafter GC] recently proposed that the International Union of the Biological Sciences should centrally regulate the taxonomy of complex organisms. Their proposal was met with much criticism (e.g. Hołyński 2017; Thomson et al., 2018), and perhaps most extensively from Raposo et al. (2017) in this journal. The main target of this criticism was GC’s call to, first, “restrict the freedom of taxonomic action”, and, second, to let social, political and conservation val…Read more
  •  20
    After decades of debates about species concepts, there is broad agreement that species are evolving lineages. However, species classification is still in a state of disorder: different methods of delimitation lead to competing outcomes for the same organisms, and the groups recognised as species are of widely different kinds. This paper considers whether this problem can be resolved by developing a unitary scale for evolutionary independence. Such a scale would show clearly when groups are compa…Read more
  •  15
    In defence of taxonomic governance
    Organisms, Diversity and Evolution 19 (2): 87-97. 2019.
    It is well known that taxonomists rely on many different methods and criteria for species delimitation, leading to different kinds of groups being recognised as species. While this state of relative disorder is widely acknowledged, there is no similar agreement about how it should be resolved. This paper considers the view that the disorder in species classification should be resolved by a system of taxonomic governance. I argue that such a system of governance is best seen as a combination of s…Read more
  •  10
    The matched papers of 17 topic in Philpapers, with its original bibliographical records and WoS UT number. The matched progress can be referred in the paper "Measuring the Isolation of Research Topics in Philosophy" by Pei-Shan Chi and Stijn Conix. Chi, P.S. & Conix, S.. Measuring the Isolation of Research Topics in Philosophy, Scientometrics.
  •  8
    Phyloreferences: Tree-Native, Reproducible, and Machine-Interpretable Taxon Concepts
    with Nico Cellinese and Hilmar Lapp
    Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 14 (8). 2022.
    Evolutionary and organismal biology have become inundated with data. At the same rate, we are experiencing a surge in broader evolutionary and ecological syntheses for which tree-thinking is the staple for a variety of post-tree analyses. To fully take advantage of this wealth of data to discover and understand large-scale evolutionary and ecological patterns, computational data integration, i.e., the use of machines to link data at large scale, is crucial. The most common shared entity by which…Read more