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Species

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Philip Kitcher
Philip Kitcher*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota
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Abstract

I defend a view of the species category, pluralistic realism, which is designed to do justice to the insights of many different groups of systematists. After arguing that species are sets and not individuals, I proceed to outline briefly some defects of the biological species concept. I draw the general moral that similar shortcomings arise for other popular views of the nature of species. These shortcomings arise because the legitimate interests of biology are diverse, and these diverse interests are reflected in different legitimate approaches to the classification of organisms. In the final section, I show briefly how the pluralistic approach can help to illuminate some areas of biological and philosophical dispute.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 308 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1984

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Footnotes

†

An earlier version of the present paper was given at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in December 1982. I am very grateful to my commentator, Elliott Sober, for some helpful criticisms and suggestions, and to Alex Rosenberg, who chaired the session and later supplied me with valuable written comments. I would also like to thank David Hull for his detailed response to a much longer manuscript on this topic (Species, eventually to be published in revised and expanded form by Bradford Books). Finally, I want to acknowledge the enormous amount I have learned from correspondence and conversations with numerous biologists and philosophers, most notably: John Beatty, Jonathan Bennett, Bill Fink, Sara Fink, Steve Gould, Marjorie Grene, Kent Holsinger, Dick Lewontin, Gregory Mayer, Ernst Mayr, Brent Mishler, Michael Ruse, Husain Sarkar, Laurance Splitter, and Ernest Williams. Residual errors are probably my own.

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