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 (...) history and its descendant discipline of biological taxonomy are prime examples of sciences dedicated to creating and managing systems of ordering data. In some sense, the idea of biological taxonomy as an information science is commonplace. Perhaps it is because of its self-evidence that the information science perspective on taxonomy has not been a major theme in the history and philosophy of science. The botanist Vernon Heywood once pointed out that historians of biology, in their ‘preoccupation with the development of the sciences of botany and zoology… [have] diverted attention from the role of taxonomy as an information science’ (Heywood 1985: 11). More specifically, he argued that historians had failed to appreciate how principles and practices that can be traced to Linnaeus constituted ‘a change in the nature of taxonomy from a local or limited folk communication system and later a codified folk taxonomy to a formal system of information science [that] marked a watershed in the history of biology’ (ibid.). A similar observation could be made about twentieth-century philosophy of biology, which mostly skipped over practical and epistemic questions about information management in taxonomy. The taxonomic themes that featured in the emerging philosophy of biology literature in the second half of the twentieth century were predominantly metaphysical in orientation. This is illustrated by what has become known as the ‘essentialism story’: an account about the essentialist nature of pre- Darwinian taxonomy that used to be accepted by many historians and philosophers, and which stimulated efforts to document and interpret shifts in the metaphysical understanding of species and (natural) classification (Richards 2010; Winsor 2003; Wilkins 2009). Although contemporary debates in the philosophy of taxonomy have moved on, much discussion continues to focus on conceptual and metaphysical issues surrounding the nature of species and the principles of classification. Discussions centring on whether species are individuals, classes, or kinds have sprung up as predictably as perennials. Raucous debates have arisen even with the aim of accommodating the diversity of views: is monism, pluralism, or eliminativism about the species category the best position to take? In addition to these, our disciplines continue to interrogate what is the nature of these different approaches to classification: are they representational or inferential roles of different approaches to classification (evolutionary taxonomy, phenetics, phylogenetic systematics)? While there is still much to learn from these discussions—in which we both actively participate—our aim with this topical collection has been to seek different entrypoints and address underexposed themes in the history and philosophy of taxonomy. We believe that approaching taxonomy as an information science prompts new questions and can open up new philosophical vistas worth exploring. A twenty-first century information science turn in the history and philosophy of taxonomy is already underway. In scientific practice and in daily life it is hard to escape the imaginaries of Big Data and the constant threats of being ‘flooded with data’. In the life sciences, these developments are often associated with the socalled bioinformatics crisis that can hopefully be contained by a new, interdisciplinary breed of bioinformaticians. These new concepts, narratives, and developments surrounding the centrality of data and information systems in the biological and biomedical sciences have raised important philosophical questions about their challenges and implications. But historical perspectives are just as necessary to judge what makes our information age different from those that preceded us. Indeed, as the British zoologist Charles Godfray has often pointed out, the piles of data that are being generated in contemporary systematic biology have led to a second bioinformatics crisis, the first being the one that confronted Linnaeus in the mid-18th century (Godfray 2007). Although our aim is to clear a path for new discussions of taxonomy from an information science-informed point of view, we continue where others in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science have already trod. We believe that an appreciation of biological taxonomy as an information science raises many questions about the philosophical, theoretical, material, and practical aspects of the use and revision of biological nomenclatures in different local and global communities of scientists and citizen scientists. In particular, conceiving of taxonomy as an information science directs attention to the temporalities of managing an accumulating data about classified entities that are themselves subject to revision, to the means by which revision is accomplished, and to the semantic, material, and collaborative contexts that mediate the execution of revisions. (shrink)

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, (...) according to the DN account, rather than fixing a name to a referent, the assignment of a type specimen to serve as the name-bearer for a taxon should be seen as performatively establishing a synonymy between a name and a definite description of the form “the taxon whose type is t”. Each taxon name is therefore associated with a criterion of application, a semantic rule that establishes the connection between the name and the descriptive content. This is the second major difference from the causal account: taxon names do have some descriptive content associated with them. The final locus of dissent concerns the strength of the modality resulting from the usage of taxon names. In order to address this point, I use the DN account to focus on the debate between Matt Haber and Joeri Witteveen concerning misidentification of type specimens, misapplication of names, and the truth conditions of Joseph LaPorte’s de dicto necessary sentence “Necessarily, any species with a type specimen contains its type specimen”. Using a pragmatic variant of the distinction between attributive and referential uses of descriptions, I argue that a metalinguistic version of the de dicto sentence is in fact falsified, as previously argued by Haber. (shrink)

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, (...) essence. The arguments appeal to the demands of biological explanation and are analogous to arguments that I have given elsewhere that a taxon has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, essence. These conclusions about the essences of individuals and taxa yield an argument for Essential Membership. Finally, I cast doubt on LaPorte’s objection to that doctrine arising from the view that a species cannot survive having a daughter. (shrink)

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 (...) and ambiguity that are key to designing effective solutions for generating big data about biodiversity. We focus on the importance of theory-dependence as a source of ambiguity in taxonomic nomenclature and hence a persistent challenge for implementing a single, long-term solution to storing and accessing meaningful sets of biological specimens. We argue that ambiguity does have a positive role to play in scientific progress as a tool for efficiently symbolizing multiple aspects of taxa and mediating between conflicting hypotheses about their nature. Pursuing a deeper understanding of the trade-offs and synthesis of precision and ambiguity as virtues of scientific language and communication systems then offers a productive next step for realizing sound, big biodiversity data services. (shrink)

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 (...) cherish their findings as valuable scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease? The paper approaches these questions by analysing how researchers conceptualised ‘history’ while backtracking and reassessing clinical and histological materials from the past. It elucidates six ways of conceptualising history as a biomedical matter: (1) scientific assessments of the past, i.e. natural scientific understandings of ‘historical facts’; (2) history in biomedicine, e.g. uses of old histological collections in present day brain banks; (3) provenance research, e.g. applying historical methods to ensure the authenticity of brain samples; (4) technical biomedical history, e.g. reproducing original staining techniques to identify how old histological slides were made; (5) founding traditions, i.e. references to historical objects and persons within founding stories of scientific communities; and (6) priority debates, e.g. evaluating the role particular persons played in the discovery of a disease such as Alzheimer’s. Against this background, the paper concludes with how the various ways of using and understanding ‘history’ were put forward to re-present historic cases as ‘proto-types’ for studying Alzheimer’s disease in the present. (shrink)

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 (...) constellation of practises, concepts and debates that can be found in various forms throughout the intertwined histories of natural-scientific, ethnographic and artistic collections. This history, however, has rarely been questioned or explored. By introducing the issue of duplicates, this paper opens up a discussion that not only connects different forms of collections, but also situates the history of collecting institutions across the disciplinary spectrum within broader political, economic and epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 406-433, April 2022.

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 (...) of biology, to advance the debate over the myth of the absolute accuracy of standards in metrology, and to address the definition-correlation debate in geology. I conclude that just as there has been a productive synergy between philosophical accounts of natural kinds and scientific taxonomic practices, so too there is much to be gained from developing a deeper understanding of the practices and philosophy of scientific types. (shrink)

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 (...) of paleontological disruption or geological discontinuity: the less obvious the boundary, the better. It has been argued that we can make sense of this practice of marking boundaries by comparing the status and function of golden spikes to that of other concrete, particular reference standards from other sciences: holotypes from biological taxonomy and measurement prototypes from the metrology of weight and measures. Alisa Bokulich (2020b) has argued that these ‘scientific types’ are in an important sense one of a kind: they have a common status and function. I will argue that this picture of high-level conceptual unity is mistaken and fails to consider the diversity of aims and purposes of standardization and classification across the sciences. I develop an alternative, disunified account of scientific types that shows how differences in ontological attitudes and epistemic aims inform scientists’ choices between different kinds of scientific types. This perspective on scientific types helps to make sense of an intriguing mid-twentieth-century debate among chronostratigraphers about the very nature of their enterprise. Should chronostratigraphers conventionally make boundaries by designating golden spikes, or should they attempt to mark pre-existing ‘natural’ boundaries with the help of a different kind of scientific type? (shrink)

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 (...) settled knowledge. We argue that historical practices in systematic biology provide an important and overlooked alternative approach to classifying and disseminating data, based on a principle of coordinative rather than definitional consensus. Systematists have developed a robust system for referring to taxonomic entities that can deliver high quality data discovery and integration without invoking consensus about reality or “settled” science. (shrink)

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 (...) offered a novel account of taxon names that, he claims, shows that the relation between a type specimen and the (sub)species it belongs to is contingent (Brzozowski in Hist Philos Life Sci 42(3):1–25, 2020). I argue that this is mistaken. While Brzozowski’s contribution helps to advance the debate by bringing concepts from the philosophy of reference to bear on taxonomic naming practices, his new account of taxon names fails to support his central argument. Indeed, I show that the philosophical concepts he introduces into the debate cement the view that it is necessary for a (sub)species with a type specimen to contain it. (shrink)

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 (...) taxonomic groups in a way that Carl Linnaeus, who is routinely cited as the “founder” of modern taxonomy and nomenclature, simply could not be. Starting from a remarkable recent study into Linnaeus’s naming of Elephasmaximus that led to the discovery of a nomenclatural error by him, we reconsider what it could mean to discover that Linnaeus misidentified a biological taxon in applying his taxon names. Through a further case study in Linnaean botany, we show that his practices of applying names in taxonomic revisions reveal a take on determining “which taxon is which” that is strikingly different from that of contemporary taxonomists. Linnaeus, we argue, adopted a practice-based, hands-on concept of taxa as “nominal spaces” that could continue to represent the same taxon even if all its former members had been reallocated to other taxa. (shrink)

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 (...) than is commonly thought. In the first part, I argued that Mayr's dichotomy was based on two distinct type/population contrasts that had been articulated much earlier by George Gaylord Simpson and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Their distinctions made eminent sense in their own, isolated contexts. In this second part, I will show how Mayr conflated these type/population distinctions and blended in some of his own, unrelated concerns with ‘types’ of a rather different sort. Although Mayr told his early critics that he was merely making “a temporary oversimplification,” he ended up burdening the history and philosophy of biology with a troubled dichotomy. (shrink)

‘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 (...) century ‘type talk.’ Farber’s taxonomy of type concepts passes over the fact that certain uses of ‘type’ began to take on a new meaning in this period. At the closing of the eighteenth century, terms like ‘type specimen,’ ‘type species,’ and ‘type genus’ were universally recognized as referring to typical, model members of their encompassing taxa. But in the course of the nineteenth century, the same terms were co-opted for a different purpose. As part of an effort to drive out nomenclatural synonymy – the confusing state of a taxon being known to different people by different names – these terms started to signify the fixed and potentially atypical name-bearing elements of taxa. A new type concept was born: the nomenclatural type. In this article, I retrace this perplexing nineteenth century shift in meaning of ‘type.’ I uncover the nomenclatural disorder that the new nomenclatural type concept dissolved, and expose the conceptual confusion it left in its tracks. What emerges is an account of how synonymy was suppressed through the coinage of a homonym. (shrink)

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 (...) provides a detailed account of the history of the type specimen which purports to show this. I argue that this attempt hinges on a conceptual confusion and therefore fails. I show that the actual history of the type specimen does not reinforce the account of epistemic virtues from Objectivity, but rather threatens to subvert it. (shrink)

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 (...) cherish their findings as valuable scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease? The paper approaches these questions by analysing how researchers conceptualised ‘history’ while backtracking and reassessing clinical and histological materials from the past. It elucidates six ways of conceptualising history as a biomedical matter: scientific assessments of the past, i.e. natural scientific understandings of ‘historical facts’; history in biomedicine, e.g. uses of old histological collections in present day brain banks; provenance research, e.g. applying historical methods to ensure the authenticity of brain samples; technical biomedical history, e.g. reproducing original staining techniques to identify how old histological slides were made; founding traditions, i.e. references to historical objects and persons within founding stories of scientific communities; and priority debates, e.g. evaluating the role particular persons played in the discovery of a disease such as Alzheimer’s. Against this background, the paper concludes with how the various ways of using and understanding ‘history’ were put forward to re-present historic cases as ‘proto-types’ for studying Alzheimer’s disease in the present. (shrink)