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  1. Suppressing Synonymy with a Homonym: The Emergence of the Nomenclatural Type Concept in Nineteenth Century Natural History.Joeri Witteveen - 2016 - Journal of the History of Biology 49 (1):135-189.
    ‘Type’ in biology is a polysemous term. In a landmark article, Paul Farber (Journal of the History of Biology 9(1): 93–119, 1976) argued that this deceptively plain term had acquired three different meanings in early nineteenth century natural history alone. ‘Type’ was used in relation to three distinct type concepts, each of them associated with a different set of practices. Important as Farber’s analysis has been for the historiography of natural history, his account conceals an important dimension of early nineteenth (...)
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  • Golden spikes, scientific types, and the ma(r)king of deep time.Joeri Witteveen - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 106 (C):70-85.
    Chronostratigraphy is the subfield of geology that studies the relative age of rock strata and that aims at producing a hierarchical classification of (global) divisions of the historical time-rock record. The ‘golden spike’ or ‘GSSP’ approach is the cornerstone of contemporary chronostratigraphic methodology. It is also perplexing. Chronostratigraphers define each global time-rock boundary extremely locally, often by driving a gold-colored pin into an exposed rock section at a particular level. Moreover, they usually avoid rock sections that show any meaningful sign (...)
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  • Understanding scientific types: holotypes, stratotypes, and measurement prototypes.Alisa Bokulich - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-28.
    At the intersection of taxonomy and nomenclature lies the scientific practice of typification. This practice occurs in biology with the use of holotypes (type specimens), in geology with the use of stratotypes, and in metrology with the use of measurement prototypes. In this paper I develop the first general definition of a scientific type and outline a new philosophical theory of types inspired by Pierre Duhem. I use this general framework to resolve the necessity-contingency debate about type specimens in philosophy (...)
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  • The history and philosophy of taxonomy as an information science.Catherine Kendig & Joeri Witteveen - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-9.
    We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. Natural (...)
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  • Coordinating dissent as an alternative to consensus classification: insights from systematics for bio-ontologies.Beckett Sterner, Joeri Witteveen & Nico Franz - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (1):1-25.
    The collection and classification of data into meaningful categories is a key step in the process of knowledge making. In the life sciences, the design of data discovery and integration tools has relied on the premise that a formal classificatory system for expressing a body of data should be grounded in consensus definitions for classifications. On this approach, exemplified by the realist program of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry, progress is maximized by grounding the representation and aggregation of data on (...)
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  • Taxonomy for Humans or Computers? Cognitive Pragmatics for Big Data.Beckett Sterner & Nico M. Franz - 2017 - Biological Theory 12 (2):99-111.
    Criticism of big data has focused on showing that more is not necessarily better, in the sense that data may lose their value when taken out of context and aggregated together. The next step is to incorporate an awareness of pitfalls for aggregation into the design of data infrastructure and institutions. A common strategy minimizes aggregation errors by increasing the precision of our conventions for identifying and classifying data. As a counterpoint, we argue that there are pragmatic trade-offs between precision (...)
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  • Objectivity, Historicity, Taxonomy.Joeri Witteveen - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (3):445-463.
    In Objectivity, Daston and Galison argue that scientific objectivity has a history. Objectivity emerged as a distinct nineteenth-century “epistemic virtue,” flanked in time by other epistemic virtues. The authors trace the origins of scientific objectivity by identifying changes in images from scientific atlases from different periods, but they emphasize that the same history could be narrated using different sorts of scientific objects. One could, for example, focus on the changing uses of “type specimens” in biological taxonomy. Daston :153–182, 2004) indeed (...)
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  • Taxon names and varieties of reference.Joeri Witteveen - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-12.
    Linnaean-style, rank-based codes of taxonomic nomenclature provide stability to the relation between taxon names and their referents through the device of nomenclatural types. The practice of using types to tether names to taxa is uncontroversial and well-understood. But the nature of the relation between types, names, and taxa continues to be a topic of philosophical debate. A particularly contested issue is whether it is necessary for taxa that have a type specimen to contain their type specimen. Jerzy Brzozowski has recently (...)
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  • A Logic of Temporal Contingency.Jie Fan - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (7):2611-2640.
    We propose a logic of temporal contingency, which has operators of past and future contingency as primitive modalities. This logic is less expressive than standard temporal logic over the class of bidirectional frames, and cannot define some basic frame properties such as bidirectionality and transitivity. We present a minimal system based on two key ‘bridge axioms’ and a bimodal version of a so-called ‘almost definability’ schema in the literature. The completeness proof is highly nontrivial due to the requirement that the (...)
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  • (1 other version)History as a biomedical matter: recent reassessments of the first cases of Alzheimer’s disease.Lara Keuck - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):1-26.
    This paper examines medical scientists’ accounts of their rediscoveries and reassessments of old materials. It looks at how historical patient files and brain samples of the first cases of Alzheimer’s disease became reused as scientific objects of inquiry in the 1990s, when a genetic neuropathologist from Munich and a psychiatrist from Frankfurt lead searches for left-overs of Alzheimer’s ‘founder cases’ from the 1900s. How and why did these researchers use historical methods, materials and narratives, and why did the biomedical community (...)
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  • Introduction: the issue of duplicates.Ina Heumann, Anne Greenwood MacKinney & Rainer Buschmann - 2022 - British Journal for the History of Science 55 (3):257-278.
    The permanent preservation of objects in global custodianship is a captivating ideal that informs countless museums’ corporate identities and governs collection guidelines as well as politics. Recent research has challenged the alleged perpetuity of collections and collected items, revealing their coherence as fragile and dependent on historically, politically and culturally specific conditions. Duplicates offer an instructive point of entry to explore the idea of collection permanence, museum politics, and the mobility of museum objects. The history of duplicates, moreover, comprises a (...)
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  • Individual essentialism in biology.Michael Devitt - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (5-6):39.
    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 paper, I address that issue from a biological basis, arguing for the Kripkean view that an organism has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, (...)
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  • Reflections on Naming and Necessity.Michael Devitt - 2021 - Theoria 88 (2):406-433.
    Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 406-433, April 2022.
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  • Of elephants and errors: naming and identity in Linnaean taxonomy.Joeri Witteveen & Staffan Müller-Wille - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (4):1-34.
    What is it to make an error in the identification of a named taxonomic group? In this article we argue that the conditions for being in error about the identity of taxonomic groups through their names have a history, and that the possibility of committing such errors is contingent on the regime of institutions and conventions governing taxonomy and nomenclature at any given point in time. More specifically, we claim that taxonomists today can be in error about the identity of (...)
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  • “A temporary oversimplification”: Mayr, Simpson, Dobzhansky, and the origins of the typology/population dichotomy. [REVIEW]Joeri Witteveen - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 (C):20-33.
    The dichotomy between ‘typological thinking’ and ‘population thinking’ features in a range of debates in contemporary and historical biology. The origins of this dichotomy are often traced to Ernst Mayr, who is said to have coined it in the 1950s as a rhetorical device that could be used to shield the Modern Synthesis from attacks by the opponents of population biology. In this two-part essay, I argue that the origins of the typology/population dichotomy are considerably more complicated and more interesting (...)
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  • (1 other version)History as a biomedical matter: recent reassessments of the first cases of Alzheimer’s disease.Lara Keuck - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):10.
    This paper examines medical scientists’ accounts of their rediscoveries and reassessments of old materials. It looks at how historical patient files and brain samples of the first cases of Alzheimer’s disease became reused as scientific objects of inquiry in the 1990s, when a genetic neuropathologist from Munich and a psychiatrist from Frankfurt lead searches for left-overs of Alzheimer’s ‘founder cases’ from the 1900s. How and why did these researchers use historical methods, materials and narratives, and why did the biomedical community (...)
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  • Biological taxon names are descriptive names.Jerzy A. Brzozowski - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-25.
    The so-called ‘type method’ widely employed in biological taxonomy is often seen as conforming to the causal-historical theory of reference. In this paper, I argue for an alternative account of reference for biological nomenclature in which taxon names are understood as descriptive names. A descriptive name, as the concept came to be known from the work of Gareth Evans, is a referring expression introduced by a definite description. There are three main differences between the DN and the causal account. First, (...)
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