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Species Pluralism Does Not Imply Species Eliminativism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ingo Brigandt
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Abstract

Marc Ereshefsky argues that pluralism about species suggests that the species concept is not theoretically useful. It is to be abandoned in favor of several concrete species concepts that denote real categories. While accepting species pluralism, the present paper rejects eliminativism about the species category. Based on the idea that the species concept is a so-called investigative kind concept, it is argued that the species concept is important and that it is possible to make sense of a general species concept despite the existence of different concrete species concepts.

Type
Evolutionary Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 70 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2003 , pp. 1305 - 1316
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Paul Griffiths, Jim Lennox, Sandy Mitchell, Marc Ereshefsky, Alan Love, and Jim Tabery for helpful comments on this paper.

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