There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls "intrinsic biological essentialism".
I will have more to say about this in a little while, but for now I merely want to note that it is in fact false to think that essentialism was something that existed before evolution, as if it was the "archaic, default" view that the modern view replaces. I had, for example, long thought that essentialism was something touted by William Whewell in the 1830s, and I had the impression that Whewell had been the inventor of essentialism (see Snyder and Hull's works cited at the end of this post). It turns out that yet another essentialist phantom has evaporated. Below the fold I give a passage by Whewell, which goes once more to support the views I and others like Polly Winsor have that there never was an essentialism in natural history.
It should be noted that "essentialism" is a coat of many colours. What Ellis and those working in physics seem to mean by it is a set of necessary properties that are ontologically fundamental. In physics, this may work; I have no idea. In natural history, it never has. What most critics of "essentialism" mean in natural history is something like "A kind has necessary and sufficient properties", which is germane to Whewell's discussion. As to Devitt's view, I think there is a perfectly benign way to interpret essentialism in a biological context which makes what he says both true and uncontroversial when stripped of trigger words like "essence". More on that later...
Whewell, William. Novum Organon Renovatum: Being the Second Part of the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 3rd ed. London: J. W. Parker and son, 1858, p175f.
13 It has already been shown that even geometry is not founded upon definitions alone: and we shall not here again analyse the fallacy of this belief in the supreme value of definitions. But we may remark that the study of Natural History appears to be the proper remedy for this erroneous habit of thought. For in every department of Natural History the object of our study is kinds of things not one of which kinds can be rigorously defined, yet all of them are sufficiently definite. In these cases we may indeed give a specific description of one of the kinds, and may call it a definition; but it is clear that such a definition does not contain the essence of the thing. We say5 that the Rose Tribe are ‘Polypetalous dicotyledons with lateral styles, superior simple ovaria, regular perigynous stamens, exalbuminous definite seeds, and alternate stipulate leaves.’ But no one would say that this was our essential conception of a rose, to be substituted for it in all cases of doubt or obscurity, by way of making our reasonings perfectly clear. Not only so; but as we have already seen6, the definition does not even apply to all the tribe. For the stipulae are absent in Lowea: the albumen is present in Neillia: the fruit of Spiraea sorbifolia is capsular. If, then, we can possess any certain knowledge in Natural History, (which no cultivator of the subject will doubt,) it is evident that our knowledge cannot depend on the possibility of laying down exact definitions and reasoning from them.
14. But it may be asked, if we cannot define a word, or a class of things which a word denotes, how can we distinguish what it does mean from what it does not mean? How can we say that it signifies one thing rather than another, except we declare what is its signification? The answer to this question involves the general principle of a natural method of classification which has already been stated7 and need not here be again dwelt on. It has been shown that names of kinds of things (genera) associate them according to total resemblances, not partial characters. The principle which connects a group of objects in natural history is not a definition but a type. Thus we take as the type of the Rose family, it may be the common wild rose; all species which resemble this flower more than they resemble any other group of species are also roses, and form one genus. All genera which resemble Roses more than they resemble any other group of genera are of the same family. And thus the Rose family is collected about some one species which is the type or central point of the group.
In such an arrangement, it may readily be conceived that though the nucleus of each group may cohere firmly together, the outskirts of contiguous groups may approach, and may even be intermingled, so that some species may doubtfully adhere to one group or another. Yet this uncertainty does not at all affect the truths which we find ourselves enabled to assert with regard to the general mass of each group. And thus we are taught that there may be very important differences between two groups of objects, although we are unable to tell where the one group ends and where the other begins; and that there may be propositions of indisputable truth, in which it is impossible to give unexceptionable definitions of the terms employed.
5 Lindley’s Nat Syst Bot p 8
6 Hist Sc Ideas b viii c ii sect 3
7 Hist Sc Ideas b viii c ii sect 3
References
Devitt, Michael. "Resurrecting Biological Essentialism." Philosophy of Science 75, no. 3 (2008): 344–82.
Ellis, Brian. Scientific Essentialism, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
———. The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism. Chesham: Acumen, 2002.
Hull, David L. The Metaphysics of Evolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
LaPorte, Joseph. Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Snyder, Laura J. "Consilience, Confirmation, and Realism." In Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories and Applications, edited by Peter Achinstein, 129-49. Baltimore and London: JHU Press, 2005.
———. Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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I'm not even sure what Essentialism means.
That reminds me: I must dig up Loren Eiseley's book about the history of thought on evolution before, during, and after Darwin's career.
The response to essentialism is that the world doesn't come with labels.
Whewell wrote:
"The principle which connects a group of objects in natural history is not a definition but a type. Thus we take as the type of the Rose family, it may be the common wild rose; all species which resemble this flower more than they resemble any other group of species are also roses, and form one genus."
...maybe not essentialist, but perhaps typological? (I'm just throwing it out there, I fear The Mighty Wilkins in these matters...)
Fear ma authoritah!
...maybe not essentialist, but perhaps typological?
Yes! Or rather the essence of groups and kinds always was based on exemplars and "affinities". The notion this was essentialism in the sense of necessary and sufficient properties is false.
I seem to remember thatt Devitt gave a talk at the U of Melbourne a few years ago: I forget what his point was, but it seemed to me that there obvious counterexamples to some of his claims from the paleontological record.
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You're in Sydney these days, no? Have you made contact with Michaelis Michael at UNSW (Philosophy) yet? He's VERY slow in publishing, but I think he has been thinking about the merits of typological thinking in biology for some years now.
Think about references to "Bauplan" in the literature, and the idea that some sorts of morphology are more or less likely to arise in taxa with a certain underlying "Bauplan" (= "phylogenetic constraints") -- it there is anything to ANY of them, then we have a certain kind of evolutionary explanation by reference to typology. This has nothing to do with ESSENCE if essence is defined in modal terms, but might not be too far from what Aristotle understood by whatever it is that gets translated "essence." Or so I have for some time suspected.
...Suppose (as I think likely) that the "definitive mammalian inner ear" was independently evolved in different clades of Mesozoic mammals. That's a phenomenon calling out for explanation. Proposal: the basic mammalian "Bauplan," with dentary/squamosal articulation, "predisposes" primitive mammals to evolve in the direction of further reduction of post-dentary bones in lower jaw, and in the direction of their incorporation into the ear: we get something that looks like orthogenesis, a "drive" toward the "perfection" of the mammalian, umm, ousia?
John,
Thanks for the explanation of early perspectives of essentialism and how it's not the same as immutability. I think I have to go back and re-read Mayr on "Upward classification by empirical grouping" in The Growth of Biological Thought now, with this in mind.
What is the advantage cited by people who "want to re-introduce the notion"? I can't quite get what the purpose would be even in physics. I am not seeing any point. I can see that it might have been more of an issue in biology relating to common descent and the use of the idea of species.
I guess you could say the Standard Model is "essentialist" to the extreme in a way. All particles are totally defined by their descriptions. Mass, charge, spin, color (and perhaps some more) parameters are absolutely specific for each particle and they are ALL (by definition) that distinguishes one from another. But why would one want to call that "essentialism" or just having a model?
If you were to argue that the Standard Model derives from some philosophic fundamentals, and that some of its categories therefore had to be included in any future physics model, that would be essentialist. The way most physicists treat it, it's just having a model.
I'm wondering to what extent there are meaningful "exemplars" in species (which I think is a better word than "essence"). Among all genomes that would be considered belonging to a species, is there some sense in which some are more "typical" than others? Is there a well-defined "center" for a species?
Let me venture into useless abstraction for a second. If A and B are two different genomes, let's say that A and B are "neighbors" in creature space if it is possible for a creature with genome A to have an offspring with genome B, or vice-versa (without assuming some ridiculous number of mutations). For simplicity, let's assume that this relationship is symmetric; if a creature of type A can have a creature of type B as an offspring, then a creature of type B can have a creature of type A as an offspring.
Then, since all creatures are cousins, that means that for any two genomes A and B of actual, viable organisms, there is a path through creature space, a sequence of genomes X_1, X_2, ..., X_n, such that A is a neighbor of X_1, which is a neighbor of X_2, etc. which is a neighbor of X_n, which is a neighbor of B.
Now, the question of exemplars and species is this: Is there any meaningful sense in which some of the steps between A and B are "exemplars" of some species, while others are "transitional forms"? The only sense that I could make of such a distinction might be about stability. Maybe, as soon as species X_2 develops, it will completely outcompete species X_1, driving it to extinction. In that case, X_1 can only be a transitional form?
I think it's also worth pointing out that the version of "essentialism" that trafficked in sets of necessary and sufficient properties was already doing violence to the traditional notion of "essential properties." Necessity, not sufficiency, is the mark of essential properties.
Just about everything Whewell says on classification is worthwhile reading; there are lots of great things hidden away there. And one nice thing about using Whewell as evidence is that you can almost guarantee that if he said it was a major view, and perhaps the dominant view, at that time.
I've often thought that one might be able to read Origin, chapter 13, as Darwin's attempt to build on Whewell's claims about natural classification, by proposing descent with modification as the foundation for natural affinity (Whewell's own preferred principle). Of course, that's one of those suspicions that I'll probably never have the time or expertise to sit down and prove or refute properly.
I am presently doing a road trip to my new city, so I can't comment extensively, but:
Allen: I think that what Putnam and Kripke meant by "essence" (and for that matter what theologians mean by "ousia") is very far from being what Aristotle meant. I haven't yet read this paper:
Tierney, Richard L. "The Scope of Aristotle's Essentialism in the Posterior Analytics." Journal of the History of Philosophy 42, no. 1 (2004): 1-20.
but I am greatly influenced by this one:
Balme, D. M. "Aristotle's Biology Was Not Essentialist." In Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology, edited by Allan Gotthelf and James G Lennox, 291-312. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
I think that what Michael has reinvented is more like Aristotle's notion of the "what it is to be" of kinds. This, of course, can be an exemplary kind, such as Whewell and others of the time had it, and it permits monsters and "the more and the less" as Aristotle suggested. In modern terms I would say it is the developmental system (something he played with pre-publication).
Brandon, this is exactly the project that Winsor and McOuat and I have been working on. Polly Winsor in particular thinks that Darwin's explicandum was the typological classification of systematists like Lindley, and especially the Quinarians.
Bob: you are exactly right. But it is arguable that Necessary and Sufficient can translate to Necessity. However the criterial essentialism is a late (post-Frege?) invention in this debate. Ellis, for example, does not rely on it.
Daryl: I think that exemplary classification is supra-specific. "Type" specimens are not really expected to be "typical" the way the type species in a genus is. This is a bit like the way some try to make monophyly apply to species, where it really doesn't. A type specimen is merely a referential anchor.
John - Yes, it's arguable that sufficiency can translate to necessity. There are those who maintain that "essence" is captured by a set of properties that are "individually necessary and jointly sufficient." There probably are some cases where this can be done; usually for "formal" or "abstract" objects. But "natural" objects seem to resist this too neat formula. So yes, it's arguable, but not very persuasively.
Is this the sort of question that gets philosophers charged up but leaves their mothers responding, "I'm sure that's very interesting, dear. Have you met a girl yet?"
No, it's the kind of question that biologists answer wrongly, giving philosophers and historians something to correct them on.
...of course, take note that the source of that last comment was someone who thinks playing with an Arduino is fun.
re: #15.
'Cause it's one of those trick questions.
Speaking as a biochemist, I've always been a bit leery of working in any sub-specialty where philosophers can provide useful, or even more horrifying, *correct* insights. It's much more comfortable when philosophers have to play catch-up with the field.
Cheers!
I can see how that might scare you. But when biologists and other scientists insist on doing history and philosophy of science, historians and philosophers of science have something to contribute back, I think...
Don't worry. You won't catch me practicing history and philosophy of science. We're a union shop.