Matthew H. Slater

Balancing the Costs of Wildlife Research with the Benefits of Understanding a Panzootic Disease, White-Nose Syndrome

Additional ethical issues surrounding wildlife research compared with biomedical research include consideration of the harm of research to the ecosystem as a whole and the benefits of conservation to the same species of animals under study. Research on white-nose syndrome in bats provides a case study to apply these considerations to determine whether research that harms ecosystems under crisis is justified. By expanding well-established guidelines for animal and human subjects research, we demonstrate that this research can be considered highly justified. Studies must minimize the amount of harm to the ecosystem while maximizing the knowledge gained. However, the likelihood of direct application of the results of the research for conservation should not necessarily take priority over other considerations, particularly when the entire context of the ecologic disaster is poorly understood. Since the emergence of white-nose syndrome, researchers have made great strides in understanding this panzootic disease and are now in a position to utilize this knowledge to mitigate this wildlife crisis.

Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds

Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non‐nomic matters of fact? Lange’s criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of primitive subjunctive facts and suggest that a ‘mixed’ metaphysics to the lawmaker question might be attractive.

Anchoring in ecosystemic kinds

The world contains many different types of ecosystems. This is something of a commonplace in biology and conservation science. But there has been little attention to the question of whether such ecosystem types enjoy a degree of objectivity—whether they might be natural kinds. I argue that traditional accounts of natural kinds that emphasize nomic or causal–mechanistic dimensions of “kindhood” are ill-equipped to accommodate presumptive ecosystemic kinds. In particular, unlike many other kinds, ecosystemic kinds are “anchored” to the contingent character of species and higher taxa and their abiotic environments. Drawing on Slater (Br J Philos Sci 66(2):375–411, 2015a), I show how we can nevertheless make room for such contingent anchoring in an account of natural kinds of ecosystems kinds.

Understanding “understanding” in Public Understanding of Science

This study examines the conflation of terms such as “knowledge” and “understanding” in peer-reviewed literature, and tests the hypothesis that little current research clearly distinguishes between importantly distinct epistemic states. Two sets of data are presented from papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. In the first set, the digital text analysis tool, Voyant, is used to analyze all papers published in 2014 for the use of epistemic success terms. In the second set of data, all papers published in Public Understanding of Science from 2010–2015 are systematically analyzed to identify instances in which epistemic states are empirically measured. The results indicate that epistemic success terms are inconsistently defined, and that measurement of understanding, in particular, is rarely achieved in public understanding of science studies. We suggest that more diligent attention to measuring understanding, as opposed to mere knowledge, will increase efficacy of scientific outreach and communication efforts.

Attempts to prime intellectual virtues for understanding of science: Failures to inspire intellectual effort

Abstract Strategies for effectively communicating scientific findings to the public are an important and growing area of study. Recognizing that some complex subjects require recipients of information to take a more active role in constructing an understanding, we sought to determine whether it was possible to increase subjects’ intellectual effort via “priming” methodologies. In particular, we asked whether subconsciously priming “intellectual virtues” (IVs), such as curiosity, perseverance, patience, and diligence might improve participants’ effort and performance on various cognitive tasks. In the first experiment, we found no significant differences in either effort or understanding between IV-primed and neutrally-primed individuals across two different priming techniques. The second experiment measured the effect of IV-priming on intellectual effort in simpler, shorter-duration puzzles and exploration activities; here, we observed an effect, but given its low strength and short duration, we do not believe that priming of IVs is a promising strategy for science communication.

Pluralism and Realism Revisited

We saw in §3.5 that biologists have proposed many different conceptions of species. Generally speaking, these conceptions are answers to the species category question: What makes some group of organisms a group at the species rank?1 This diversity of answers is problematic for several reasons. One problem has a purely practical character. If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves talking past one another when talking about species. That difficulty can be addressed, of course, by simply taking care to say precisely what we mean by ‘species’.

The Natural Kindness Approach

The Populationist approach to species reference articulated in Chapter 5 has a distinctly nominalist flavor. As such, it pulls against the realist stance on species. The task of this chapter will be to explain how to supplement Populationism with a certain picture of natural kinds that allows us to hold on to many—though not all—of our realist intuitions. That picture will be a revision and expansion of Richard Boyd’s Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) account of natural kinds.

Metaphysics of Species for the Commitment-wary

I have argued that Species-as-Individuals (SAI) can be defended only at steep cost. It might, of course, be a cost worth paying. But to decide this we should consider the alternatives. At this point, a defender of SAI is likely to cry in exasperation: What alternatives?! Everything must be either concrete or abstract. There’s no third option. “We can apply the terms ‘class’ and ‘individual’ to all bona fide ontological categories” (Ghiselin 1997, p. 37). Things are, however, a bit more complicated than Ghiselin makes out. In the first place, most philosophers will want to think of classes and individuals as ontological categories, rather than properties of ontological categories. A more reasonable interpretation of Ghiselin’s claim is that any bona fide entity must fit in one ontological category or another—and that there are only two: classes and individuals. While coherent, this latter claim is controversial. Some philosophers have explored ontologies with more than two categories.1