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  1. New Essentialism in Biology.Olivier Rieppel - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (5):662-673.
    The architects of the modern synthesis banned essentialism from evolutionary theory. This rejection of essentialism was motivated by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and the continuity of evolutionary transformation. Contemporary evolutionary biology witnesses a renaissance of essentialism in three contexts: “origin essentialism” with respect to species and supraspecific taxa, the bar coding of species on the basis of discontinuities of DNA variation between populations, and the search for laws of evolutionary developmental biology. Such “new essentialism” in contemporary biology must be (...)
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  • (4 other versions)Naming and necessity.Saul Kripke - 2010 - In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language. New York: Routledge. pp. 431-433.
    _Naming and Necessity_ has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here reissued in a newly corrected form with a new preface by the author. If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics, or in philosophy of language, this is (...)
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  • Biological Species Are Natural Kinds.Crawford L. Elder - 2008 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):339-362.
    This paper argues that typical biological species are natural kinds, on a familiar realist understanding of natural kinds—classes of individuals across which certain properties cluster together, in virtue of the causal workings of the world. But the clustering is far from exceptionless. Virtually no properties, or property-combinations, characterize every last member of a typical species—unless they can also appear outside the species. This motivates some to hold that what ties together the members of a species is the ability to interbreed, (...)
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  • Homology: Homeostatic Property Cluster Kinds in Systematics and Evolution.Leandro Assis & Ingo Brigandt - 2009 - Evolutionary Biology 36:248-255.
    Taxa and homologues can in our view be construed both as kinds and as individuals. However, the conceptualization of taxa as natural kinds in the sense of homeostatic property cluster kinds has been criticized by some systematists, as it seems that even such kinds cannot evolve due to their being homeostatic. We reply by arguing that the treatment of transformational and taxic homologies, respectively, as dynamic and static aspects of the same homeostatic property cluster kind represents a good perspective for (...)
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  • Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Professor Hilary Putnam has been one of the most influential and sharply original of recent American philosophers in a whole range of fields. His most important published work is collected here, together with several new and substantial studies, in two volumes. The first deals with the philosophy of mathematics and of science and the nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry; the second deals with the philosophy of language and mind. Volume one is now issued in a new edition, including an (...)
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  • Species as a process.Olivier Rieppel - 2008 - Acta Biotheoretica (1-2):33-49.
    Species are generally considered to be the basic units of evolution, and hence to constitute spatio-temporally bounded entities. In addition, it has been argued that species also instantiate a natural kind. Evolution is fundamentally about change. The question then is how species can remain the same through evolutionary change. Proponents of the species qua individuals thesis individuate species through their unique evolutionary origin. Individuals, or spatio-temporally located particulars in general, can be bodies, objects, events, or processes, or a combination of (...)
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  • Typology now: homology and developmental constraints explain evolvability.Ingo Brigandt - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (5):709-725.
    By linking the concepts of homology and morphological organization to evolvability, this paper attempts to (1) bridge the gap between developmental and phylogenetic approaches to homology and to (2) show that developmental constraints and natural selection are compatible and in fact complementary. I conceive of a homologue as a unit of morphological evolvability, i.e., as a part of an organism that can exhibit heritable phenotypic variation independently of the organism’s other homologues. An account of homology therefore consists in explaining how (...)
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  • A tradition of natural kinds.Ian Hacking - 1991 - Philosophical Studies 61 (1-2):109-26.
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  • (2 other versions)Special sciences (or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis).Jerry Fodor - 1974 - Synthese 28 (2):97-115.
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  • Elements, Compounds, and Other Chemical Kinds.Robin Findlay Hendry - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):864-875.
    In this article I assess the problems and prospects of a microstructural approach to chemical substances. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously claimed that to be gold is to have atomic number 79 and to be water is to be H2O. I relate the first claim to the concept of element in the history of chemistry, arguing that the reference of element names is determined by atomic number. Compounds are more difficult: water is so complex and heterogeneous at the molecular (...)
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  • The poverty of taxonomic characters.Olivier Rieppel & Maureen Kearney - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (1):95-113.
    The theory and practice of contemporary comparative biology and phylogeny reconstruction (systematics) emphasizes algorithmic aspects but neglects a concern for the evidence. The character data used in systematics to formulate hypotheses of relationships in many ways constitute a black box, subject to uncritical assessment and social influence. Concerned that such a state of affairs leaves systematics and the phylogenetic theories it generates severely underdetermined, we investigate the nature of the criteria of homology and their application to character conceptualization in the (...)
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  • When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds.Robert A. Wilson, Matthew J. Barker & Ingo Brigandt - 2007 - Philosophical Topics 35 (1-2):189-215.
    Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion (...)
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  • The phenomena of homology.Paul Edmund Griffiths - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (5):643-658.
    Philosophical discussions of biological classification have failed to recognise the central role of homology in the classification of biological parts and processes. One reason for this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between judgments of homology and the core explanatory theories of biology. The textbook characterisation of homology as identity by descent is commonly regarded as a definition. I suggest instead that it is one of several attempts to explain the phenomena of homology. Twenty years ago the ‘new experimentalist’ movement (...)
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  • What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories.Paul E. Griffiths - 1997 - University of Chicago Press.
    Paul E. Griffiths argues that most research on the emotions has been as misguided as Aristotelian efforts to study "superlunary objects" - objects...
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  • The Natural Kind Status of Emotion.Louis C. Charland - 2002 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (4):511-37.
    It has been argued recently that some basic emotions should be considered natural kinds. This is different from the question whether as a class emotions form a natural kind; that is, whether emotion is a natural kind. The consensus on that issue appears to be negative. I argue that this pessimism is unwarranted and that there are in fact good reasons for entertaining the hypothesis that emotion is a natural kind. I interpret this to mean that there exists a distinct (...)
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  • (1 other version)Historical kinds and the "special sciences".Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 95 (1-2):45-65.
    There are no "special sciences" in Fodor's sense. There is a large group of sciences, "historical sciences," that differ fundamentally from the physical sciences because they quantify over a different kind of natural or real kind, nor are the generalizations supported by these kinds exceptionless. Heterogeneity, however, is not characteristic of these kinds. That there could be an univocal empirical science that ranged over multiple realizations of a functional property is quite problematic. If psychological predicates name multiply realized functionalist properties, (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Special sciences.Jerry A. Fodor - 1974 - Synthese 28 (2):97-115.
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  • Naming and Necessity: Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium.Saul A. Kripke - 1980 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.
    A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.
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  • Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight.Ian Hacking - 2007 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 61:203-239.
    The rosy dawn of my title refers to that optimistic time when the logical concept of a natural kind originated in Victorian England. The scholastic twilight refers to the present state of affairs. I devote more space to dawn than twilight, because one basic problem was there from the start, and by now those origins have been forgotten. Philosophers have learned many things about classification from the tradition of natural kinds. But now it is in disarray and is unlikely to (...)
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  • Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change.Joseph Laporte - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (221):672-674.
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  • Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change.Joseph LaPorte - 2003 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    According to the received tradition, the language used to to refer to natural kinds in scientific discourse remains stable even as theories about these kinds are refined. In this illuminating book, Joseph LaPorte argues that scientists do not discover that sentences about natural kinds, like 'Whales are mammals, not fish', are true rather than false. Instead, scientists find that these sentences were vague in the language of earlier speakers and they refine the meanings of the relevant natural-kind terms to make (...)
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  • Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with Historical Essences.Paul E. Griffiths - 1999 - In Robert Andrew Wilson (ed.), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. MIT Press. pp. 209-228.
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  • (1 other version)Generalizations and kinds in natural science: the case of species.Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2):230-255.
    Species in biology are traditionally perceived as kinds of organisms about which explanatory and predictive generalizations can be made, and biologists commonly use species in this manner. This perception of species is, however, in stark contrast with the currently accepted view that species are not kinds or classes at all, but individuals. In this paper I investigate the conditions under which the two views of species might be held simultaneously. Specifically, I ask whether upon acceptance of an ontology of species (...)
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  • Cell Types as Natural Kinds.Matthew H. Slater - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (2):170-179.
    Talk of different types of cells is commonplace in the biological sciences. We know a great deal, for example, about human muscle cells by studying the same type of cells in mice. Information about cell type is apparently largely projectible across species boundaries. But what defines cell type? Do cells come pre-packaged into different natural kinds? Philosophical attention to these questions has been extremely limited [see e.g., Wilson (Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, pp 187–207, 1999; Genes and the Agents of Life, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground.Hilary Kornblith - 1993 - MIT Press.
    Hilary Kornblith presents an account of inductive inference that addresses both its metaphysical and epistemological aspects. He argues that inductive knowledge is possible by virtue of the fit between our innate psychological capacities and the causal structure of the world. Kornblith begins by developing an account of natural kinds that has its origins in John Locke's work on real and nominal essences. In Kornblith's view, a natural kind is a stable cluster of properties that are bound together in nature. The (...)
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  • Practical, Functional, and Natural Kinds.Nick Haslam - 2002 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 9 (3):237-241.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 237-241 [Access article in PDF] Practical, Functional, and Natural Kinds Nick Haslam Keywords: Classification, essentialism, natural kinds, practical kinds. I am grateful to the two commentators for giving my paper their serious attention, and for writing such stimulating, clarifying, and challenging responses. In a brief response I can only begin to discuss a select few issues, although both commentaries could generate a great (...)
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  • Scientific Realism and Naturalistic Epistemology.Richard Boyd - 1980 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980:613-662.
    A realistic and dialectical conception of the epistemology of science is advanced according to which the acquisition of instrumental knowledge is parasitic upon the acquisition, by successive approximation, of theoretical knowledge. This conception is extended to provide an epistemological characterization of reference and of natural kinds, and it is integrated into recent naturalistic treatments of knowledge. Implications for several current issues in the philosophy of science are explored.
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  • Homeostasis, species, and higher taxa.Richard Boyd - 1999 - In Robert Andrew Wilson (ed.), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. MIT Press. pp. 141-85.
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  • Darwinian metaphysics: Species and the question of essentialism.Samir Okasha - 2002 - Synthese 131 (2):191-213.
    Biologists and philosophers of biology typically regard essentialism about speciesas incompatible with modern Darwinian theory. Analytic metaphysicians such asKripke, Putnam and Wiggins, on the other hand, believe that their essentialist thesesare applicable to biological kinds. I explore this tension. I show that standard anti-essentialist considerations only show that species do not have intrinsic essential properties. I argue that while Putnam and Kripke do make assumptions that contradict received biological opinion, their model of natural kinds, suitably modified, is partially applicable to (...)
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  • Natural Kinds in Evolution and Systematics: Metaphysical and Epistemological Considerations.Ingo Brigandt - 2009 - Acta Biotheoretica 57 (1-2):77-97.
    Despite the traditional focus on metaphysical issues in discussions of natural kinds in biology, epistemological considerations are at least as important. By revisiting the debate as to whether taxa are kinds or individuals, I argue that both accounts are metaphysically compatible, but that one or the other approach can be pragmatically preferable depending on the epistemic context. Recent objections against construing species as homeostatic property cluster kinds are also addressed. The second part of the paper broadens the perspective by considering (...)
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  • Kinds of kinds: A conceptual taxonomy of psychiatric categories.Nick Haslam - 2002 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 9 (3):203-217.
    A pluralistic view of psychiatric classification is defended, according to which psychiatric categories take a variety of structural forms. An ordered taxonomy of these forms—non-kinds, practical kinds, fuzzy kinds, discrete kinds, and natural kinds—is presented and exemplified. It is argued that psychiatric categories cannot all be understood as pragmatically grounded, and at least some reflect naturally occurring discontinuities without thereby representing natural kinds. Even if essentialist accounts of mental disorders are generally mistaken, they are not implied whenever a psychiatric category (...)
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  • Kinds, complexity, and multiple realization.Robert Boyd - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 95 (1-2):67-98.
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  • (4 other versions)Naming and Necessity.Saul Kripke - 2003 - In John Heil (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds.Richard Boyd - 1991 - Philosophical Studies 61 (1):127-148.
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  • (2 other versions)The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunuty of Science.[author unknown] - 1995 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 68 (3):84-86.
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  • Scientific Essentialism.Brian Ellis - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Scientific Essentialism defends the view that the fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things on which they are said to operate, and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed upon the world by God, the forces of nature or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world. Ellis argues that ours is a dynamic world consisting of more or less transient objects which are constantly interacting with each other, and whose (...)
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  • What is Water?Paul Needham - 2000 - Analysis 60 (1):13-21.
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  • What's Wrong with the New Biological Essentialism.Marc Ereshefsky - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (5):674-685.
    The received view in the philosophy of biology is that biological taxa (species and higher taxa) do not have essences. Recently, some philosophers (Boyd, Devitt, Griffiths, LaPorte, Okasha, and Wilson) have suggested new forms of biological essentialism. They argue that according to these new forms of essentialism, biological taxa do have essences. This article critically evaluates the new biological essentialism. This article’s thesis is that the costs of adopting the new biological essentialism are many, yet the benefits are none, so (...)
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  • Mind, Language and Reality.[author unknown] - 1975 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 39 (2):361-362.
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  • What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories.Paul E. Griffiths - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (4):642-648.
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  • Psychiatric Disorders qua Natural Kinds: The Case of the “Apathetic Children”.Marion Godman - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (2):144-152.
    In this article I examine some of the issues involved in taking psychiatric disorders as natural kinds. I begin by introducing a permissive model of natural kind-hood that at least prima facie seems to allow psychiatric disorders to be natural kinds. The model, however, hinges on there in principle being some grounding that is shared by all members of a kind, which explain all or most of the additional shared projectible properties. This leads us to the following question: what grounding (...)
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  • Outline of an explanatory account of cladistic practice.Nico M. Franz - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):489-515.
    A naturalistic account of the strengths and limitations of cladistic practice is offered. The success of cladistics is claimed to be largely rooted in the parsimony-implementing congruence test. Cladists may use the congruence test to iteratively refine assessments of homology, and thereby increase the odds of reliable phylogenetic inference under parsimony. This explanation challenges alternative views which tend to ignore the effects of parsimony on the process of character individuation in systematics. In a related theme, the concept of homeostatic property (...)
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  • How to Fix Kind Membership: A Problem for HPC Theory and a Solution.Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (5):724-736.
    Natural kinds are often contrasted with other kinds of scientific kinds, especially functional kinds, because of a presumed categorical difference in explanatory value: supposedly, natural kinds can ground explanations, while other kinds of kinds cannot. I argue against this view of natural kinds by examining a particular type of explanation—mechanistic explanation—and showing that functional kinds do the same work there as traditionally recognized natural kinds are supposed to do in “standard” scientific explanations. Breaking down this categorical distinction between traditional natural (...)
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  • The PhyloCode: A critical discussion of its theoretical foundation.Olivier Rieppel - 2006 - Cladistics 22:186-197.
    The definition of taxon names as formalized by the PhyloCode is based on Kripke's thesis of “rigid designation” that applies to Millian proper names. Accepting the thesis of “rigid designation” into systematics in turn is based on the thesis that species, and taxa, are individuals. These largely semantic and metaphysical issues are here contrasted with an epistemological approach to taxonomy. It is shown that the thesis of “rigid designation” if deployed in taxonomy introduces a new essentialism into systematics, which is (...)
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  • Reydon on species, individuals and kinds: a reply.Olivier Rieppel - 2009 - Cladistics 26 (4):341-343.
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  • (4 other versions)Naming and Necessity.S. Kripke - 1972 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 45 (4):665-666.
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  • Kinds, Complexity and Multiple realization.Richard Boyd - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 95 (1-2):67-98.
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  • Is ‘Natural Kind’ a Natural Kind Term?John Dupré - 2002 - The Monist 85 (1):29-49.
    The traditional home for the concept of a natural kind in biology is of course taxonomy, the sorting of organisms into a nested hierarchy of kinds. Many taxonomists and most philosophers of biology now deny that it is possible to sort organisms into natural kinds. Many do not think that biological taxonomy sorts them into kinds at all, but rather identifies them as parts of historical individuals. But at any rate if the species, genera and so on of biological taxonomy (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Natural Kinds.W. V. O. Quine - 1970 - In Carl G. Hempel, Donald Davidson & Nicholas Rescher (eds.), Essays in honor of Carl G. Hempel. Dordrecht,: D. Reidel. pp. 5.
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  • Scientific Essentialism.Lenny Clapp - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (4):589-594.
    Scientific Essentialism defends the view that the fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things on which they are said to operate, and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed upon the world by God, the forces of nature, or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world. Ellis argues that ours is a dynamic world consisting of more or less transient objects that are constantly interacting with each other, and whose (...)
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