Natural history as stamp collecting: a brief history

Johnson, Kristin

doi:10.3366/anh.2007.34.2.244

Cited by 32 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Most scientists did not favor the use of hypotheses during the eighteenth century, but this perspective changed dramatically over the next 100 years (Laudan 1981 ). By the late nineteenth century, largely descriptive disciplines such as natural history were beginning to be dismissed as a form of “stamp collecting” (Johnson 2007 ). Popper's (1963) emphasis on the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method proved hugely influential during the twentieth century, and most textbooks continue to focus on hypothesis testing as the core of the scientific method (see figure 1 ; Harwood 2004 ).…”

Section: Debates Over Scientific Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptions of Good Science in Our Data-Rich World

Elliott¹,

Cheruvelil²,

Montgomery³

et al. 2016

BioScience

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Scientists have been debating for centuries the nature of proper scientific methods. Currently, criticisms being thrown at data-intensive science are reinvigorating these debates. However, many of these criticisms represent long-standing conflicts over the role of hypothesis testing in science and not just a dispute about the amount of data used. Here, we show that an iterative account of scientific methods developed by historians and philosophers of science can help make sense of data-intensive scientific practices and suggest more effective ways to evaluate this research. We use case studies of Darwin's research on evolution by natural selection and modern-day research on macrosystems ecology to illustrate this account of scientific methods and the innovative approaches to scientific evaluation that it encourages. We point out recent changes in the spheres of science funding, publishing, and education that reflect this richer account of scientific practice, and we propose additional reforms.

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Section: Debates Over Scientific Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptions of Good Science in Our Data-Rich World

Elliott¹,

Cheruvelil²,

Montgomery³

et al. 2016

BioScience

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show abstract

“…For example, they might collect data about the presence of particular species in specific locations at particular points of time (Cohn 2008;Silvertown 2009), or they might collect information about the environmental quality of the air or water near them ( Corburn 2005;Ottinger 2010), or they might monitor local temperatures or precipitation (Roy et al 2012). Critics sometimes dismiss these kinds of studies, whether they are performed by citizens or professional scientists, as uninteresting "fishing expeditions" or exercises in "stamp collecting" (Boyd and Crawford 2012;Johnson 2007). A recent essay by two program officers at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Liam O'Fallon and Symma Finn (2015), helps to sharpen these concerns.…”

Section: Concern #1: Data-intensive Versus Hypothesis-driven Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophical Foundations for Citizen Science

Elliott

Rosenberg

2019

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice

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Citizen science is increasingly being recognized as an important approach for gathering data, addressing community needs, and creating fruitful engagement between citizens and professional scientists. Nevertheless, the implementation of citizen science projects can be hampered by a variety of barriers. Some of these are practical (e.g., lack of funding or lack of training for both professional scientists and volunteers), but others are theoretical barriers having to do with concerns about whether citizen science lives up to standards of good scientific practice. These concerns about the overall quality of citizen science are ethically significant, because it is ethically problematic to waste resources on low-quality research, and it is also problematic to denigrate or dismiss research that is of high quality. Scholarship from the philosophy of science is well-placed to address these theoretical barriers, insofar as it is fundamentally concerned about the nature of good scientific inquiry. This paper examines three important concerns: (1) the worry that citizen science is not appropriately hypothesis-driven; (2) the worry that citizen science does not generate sufficiently high-quality data or use sufficiently rigorous methods; and (3) the worry that citizen science is tainted by advocacy and is therefore not sufficiently disinterested. We show that even though some of these concerns may be relevant to specific instances of citizen science, none of these three concerns provides a compelling reason to challenge the overall quality of citizen science in principle.

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“…As such, taxonomy is very far for stamp collecting and belongs by its own merit to the sphere of science (for the origin of the Rutherford quotation see Johnson, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's in a (biological) name? The wrath of Lord Rutherford

2013

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Names in taxonomy have seven different and important properties, some due to their existence in the context of classifications. Names confer or facilitate individuation, information storage and retrieval, and set theories of relationships, explanatory power, testable predictions, conceptual power, and language. No other way of naming in science is so powerful. And this is possible because taxonomic naming is done with full consideration of the theoretical specification of empirical data (characters) and their correspondence among taxa via homology statements. Since Darwin and Hennig, sets of homologous characters distributed among taxa allow precise hypotheses of a genealogical relationship, and this relationship is reflected in the way naming results in a classification.

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Natural history as stamp collecting: a brief history

Cited by 32 publications

References 50 publications

Conceptions of Good Science in Our Data-Rich World

Conceptions of Good Science in Our Data-Rich World

Philosophical Foundations for Citizen Science

What's in a (biological) name? The wrath of Lord Rutherford

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