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1 1 Carving Nature at Its Joints 1.1 Tao and the Art of Knife Maintenance Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What’s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher’s impressive knife-work. “Ordinary butchers,” he replies “hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it find its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening” (Kahn 1995, vii; see also Watson 2003, 46). Plato famously employed this “carving” metaphor as an analogy for the reality of Forms (Phaedrus 265e): like an animal, the world comes to us predivided. Ideally, our best theories will be those which “carve nature at its joints.” While Plato employed this metaphor to convey his view about the reality of Forms, its most common contemporary use involves the success of science—particularly, its success in identifying distinct kinds of things. Scientists often report discovering new kinds of things—a new species of mammal or a novel kind of fundamental particle, for example—or uncovering more information about already familiar kinds. Moreover, we often notice considerable overlap in different approaches to classification. As Ernst Mayr put it: No naturalist would question the reality of the species he may find in his garden, whether it is a catbird, chickadee, robin, or starling. And the same is true for trees or flowering plants. Species at a given locality are almost invariably separated from each other by a distinct gap. Nothing convinced me so fully of the reality of species as the observation . . . that the Stone Age natives in the mountains of New Guinea recognize as species exactly the same entities of nature as a western scientist. (1987, 146) Introduction: Lessons from the Scientific Butchery Matthew H. Slater and Andrea Borghini 2 M. H. Slater and A. Borghini Such agreement is certainly suggestive. It suggests that taxonomies are discoveries rather than mere inventions. Couple this with their utility in scientific inference and explanation and we have compelling reason for accepting the objective, independent reality of many different natural kinds of things. The members of such kinds would be the meat between the joints along which good theories cut. The goal of this introductory essay is to survey some important contemporary trends and issues regarding natural kinds, filling in the picture with key historical episodes. We conclude with a synopsis of the essays contained in this volume. 1.2 Applying the Metaphor Not everyone appreciates Plato’s metaphor. Some dislike its bloody connotations : perhaps we should refocus on garment-deconstruction and speak instead of “cutting nature at its seams.” Others find it difficult to make much sense of the metaphor itself: even if actual butchery, past or present, bears out the Taoist ideal of the knife that never needs sharpening, what sense can we give to “nature’s joints”? While there is undoubtedly much agreement about how to classify nature, it is not always clear how to interpret this. As Rosenberg (1987) reminds us, even impressively widespread cross-cultural classificatory prejudice might reflect our shared way of seeing the world—a human prejudice—rather than the reality of the divisions themselves. Moreover, while agreement is common, so is disagreement. For example, the dispute about the proper definition of biological species has persisted long enough to have acquired a name: the species problem. This leads many to suggest that there are various acceptable ways of carving up biological reality, none of which is privileged over the others. If this is so, do we lose reason for thinking there are natural kinds, at least at this level of granularity? Though the metaphysical status of species has been a key battleground over questions about natural kinds, many related questions are discussed below and in the following essays. In general, we might want an answer to what Ian Hacking has called a “gentle metaphysical question ”: “are there natural kinds—real or true kinds found in or made by nature?” (1990, 135).1 Broadly speaking, philosophers have pursued two strategies for fleshing out an answer to this last question. First, we may ask after the metaphysics of natural kinds. What (to press Plato’s metaphor further) is the “skeletal structure” of nature? Joints are gaps: what are they gaps between? At first blush, it would seem that natural kinds...

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