From Classificatory to Quantitative Concepts in the Study of Sociality in Animals: An Epistemological View

Adapting fundamental concepts from insect societies to the demands of bio-ontologies

“…Terminological standardization has been a matter of debate among research groups that study insect societies for several years (Costa & Fitzgerald 1996, 2005Peeters 2012; Neco et al 2018;Silva & Feitosa 2019a;Sumner et al 2018).…”

Measuring communicative complexity across modalities: a new framework in the context of the “social complexity hypothesis” and its application in true lemurs

“…Hence, even if some level of discussion started in the 90s about what complexity really is, there is still no general agreement on its definition, neither within nor among disciplines (McShea 1991(McShea , 2016Adami 2002;Bennett 2003). In biology, following Rudolph Carnap's topology, we more frequently use the term complexity as a comparative concept rather than a classificatory one (Neco et al 2018). Indeed, we are usually more interested to compare structures, organisms, societies to each other on a relative scale than to state that these are or are not complex in themselves (Neco et al 2018).…”

“…In biology, following Rudolph Carnap's topology, we more frequently use the term complexity as a comparative concept rather than a classificatory one (Neco et al 2018). Indeed, we are usually more interested to compare structures, organisms, societies to each other on a relative scale than to state that these are or are not complex in themselves (Neco et al 2018). But, as science develops and as predicted by Carnap, more quantitative tools should be used to improve objectivity (McShea 2016;Neco et al 2018).…”

“…Indeed, we are usually more interested to compare structures, organisms, societies to each other on a relative scale than to state that these are or are not complex in themselves (Neco et al 2018). But, as science develops and as predicted by Carnap, more quantitative tools should be used to improve objectivity (McShea 2016;Neco et al 2018). Complexity, in its broad colloquial sense, appears not to be an objective measurable variable (McShea 2016), but its etymology opens the door to possible operational definitions.…”

“…Maybe what we should extract out of these last paragraphs is that it is short-sighted to expect that a single approach to complexity will capture all the relevant aspects of the complexity of a system. Complexity should rather be conceptualized and operationalized along multiple axes (Blumstein and Armitage 1997;Neco et al 2018;Peckre et al 2019;Hobson et al 2019). In this sense, many quantitative concepts have been proposed…”