The species problem is often described as the abundance of conflicting definitions of species, such as the biological species concept and phylogenetic species concepts. But biologists understand the notion of species in a non-definitional as well as a definitional way. In this article I argue that when they understand species without a definition in their mind, their understanding is often mediated by the notion of good species, or prototypical species, as the idea of "prototype" is explicated in cognitive psychology. This distinction helps us make sense of several puzzling phenomena regarding biologists' dealing with species, such as the fact that in everyday research biologists often behave as if the species problem is solved, while they should be fully aware that it is not. I also briefly discuss implications of this finding, including that some extant attempts to answer what the nature of species is have an inadequate assumption about how the notion of species is represented in biologists' minds.
Gerd Gigerenzer's views on probabilistic reasoning in humans have come under close scrutiny. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the evolutionary component of his argument. According to Gigerenzer, reasoning about probabilities as frequencies is so common today because it was favored by natural selection in the past. This paper presents a critical examination of this argument.It will show first, that, pace Gigerenzer, there are some reasons to believe that using the frequency format was not more adaptive than using the standard (percentage) format and, second, that Gigerenzer's evolutionary argument and his other arguments such as his historical description of the notion of probability are in tension with each other.
In Realism and Naturalizing Knowledge (Keisho Shobo, 2013), Ryo Uehara carefully formulates the homeostatic property cluster theory of natural kinds and expands it by applying this framework to artifacts and knowledge and thereby drawing them in the naturalistic picture of the world. This is a substantial addition to the development of naturalistic philosophy in Japan. In this essay I shall make general comments on his account of natural kinds in the following respects: Uehara's distinction between real and nominal kinds, his objection to the species-as-individual thesis, the relative lack of attention to the distinction between the realism of natural kinds and the scientific realism, and finally, races as possible natural kinds.
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