Categories, life, and thinking

Abstract

Classifying is a fundamental operation in the acquisition of knowledge. Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical. More positively, it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines. Composite wholes, such as species and societies, are “individuals” in the logical sense, and should not be treated as if they were classes. A group of analogous features is a natural kind, but a group of homologous features is not. Imposing hypotheses justified only on the basis of nominalist, realist, phenomenalist, or conceptualist metaphysics upon the neurophysiology of organisms or upon the causes of behavior exemplifies the “psychologist's fallacy” of William James. Levels should be distinguished from their members and from classes of levels, and the ontological status of entities ranked at levels should be made clear. It is important not to confuse such categories as substance and process with one another. Several genetical terms, such as “gene” and chromosome,” are even more equivocal than has been realized. Discussions about units of selection, behavior, and thinking suffer from the ambiguity of a “unit of” an entity. An important source of misunderstanding about natural selection is the habit of treating it as an “agent”: in an important sense, natural selection does not “act” at all.

Phylogenetic Systematics and the Species Problem

“…That organisms are not the only kind of biological "individuals" follows from accepting that living matter is organized into wholes that are themselves parts of more inclusive wholes. Although Ghiselin (1966Ghiselin ( , 1974Ghiselin ( , 1981Ghiselin ( , 1985 and Hull (1976Hull ( , 1977Hull ( , 1978 deserve credit for popularizing and developing the idea that species are appropriately viewed as individuals in the philosophical sense, very similar ideas were set forth independently by Hennig (1966) and Griffiths (1974), whose discussions of the individuality of biological taxa stem from the writings of even earlier authors (i.e. Woodger, 1952;Gregg, 1954).…”

Replacement of an Essentialistic Perspective on Taxonomic Definitions as Exemplified by the Definition of "Mammalia"

“…I have argued elsewhere (de Queiroz, 1992(de Queiroz, ,1994) that phylogenetic definitions of taxon names not only are compatible with this proposition but they also provide the basis for resolving a seemingly fundamental disagreement between its advocates (e.g., Kitts and Kitts, 1979;Kitts, 1983Kitts, , 1984Bernier, 1984) and their critics (e.g., Ghiselin, 1974Ghiselin, ,1981Ghiselin, ,1984aGhiselin, , 1994Hull, 1976Hull, , 1978. Moreover, to the extent that intensions are the same as defining formulas, the present analysis rests on the applicability of this concept to the names of biological taxa.…”

“…Instead, it describes a concrete composite whole known as a clade. Thus, mammalian organisms are not viewed as members of an abstract category to which they belong because they share certain traits but rather as component parts of a larger whole into which they are united by common evolutionary descent (e.g., Woodger, 1952;Hennig, 1966Hennig, , 1975Ghiselin, 1969Ghiselin, , 1980Ghiselin, , 1981Ghiselin, , 1984bGhiselin, , 1994Griffiths, 1974;Hull, 1978;Patterson, 1978;de Queiroz, 1988de Queiroz, , 1994Donoghue, 1988, 1990).…”

Clases lógicas y colectivas: ¿Dos modos de organización jerárquica?

“…En este sentido, la categoría estática de la función implicativa de la inteligencia, que se conoce con el nombre de clase, ha sido ampliamente tratada en el marco de estas disciplinas y ha sido considerada como una operación fundamental en la adquisición del conocimiento (cf. Ghiselin, 1981).…”