 For the seminar, we really wanted to have a mix of philosophers and historians and scientists. So that's why Vincent is here, because he's sort of sitting between scientists and philosophers. He's doing PhD in between the Center for Environmental Sciences at UHAS and the Philosophers at Kebeloven. And he's going to talk about us today about Draco-philosophical science in the context of a project on taxonomic disorder that they are carrying out. And that's it. Yeah, thank you for the introduction. Indeed, yeah, if you're talking about a mix of discipline, I'm like in sort of continuous identity crisis, whatever. Am I a philosopher? Am I a biologist? Am I something else? I always say there's like, I don't know if you know a beer for that IPA, and it's Indian Pale Ale, but it's Loganese. Not really Indian and not really Pale Ale. I'm like, not really a philosopher, not really a biologist. But anyway, thanks for having me. It's an honor, of course. Normally there would be two of us. This would be me and Stan Koenig, who also works at the Institute in Leuven, and who will come here from January onwards. He will be your future colleague. But I couldn't be here today, so it's only me. Okay, so what am I going to talk about? About the idea of empirical philosophy of science, whatever that may be. We know that various philosophical disciplines face calls to use empirical methods or empirical data in their research, and that includes philosophy of science. These calls are quite diverse. It comes in the name of empirical philosophy, but also, for example, experimental philosophy or naturalistic philosophy. We all think it can be brought down to the same root, namely of using empirical information in philosophical research. And for some people there is, for some reasons, controversions. They are like, is that still philosophy? That's a question you often hear when you talk about the empirical research you do in philosophy. They might find it very interesting that they say, but this is not philosophy, so. But in our opinion it shouldn't be controversial because many philosophical disciplines made descriptive claims about the world. I mean, that's what science does as well so. For that reason you could say it's controversial to use empirical instruments next to traditional philosophical instruments to do descriptive work like case studies and thought experiments. For example, to have quantitative evidence to support information you obtain from thought experiments or case studies. In general, we believe that to have the best chance to ever solve a philosophical problem, if we will ever be able to do that, we should be methodologically overminded. Of course, there's a big side note to that. It's not because we advocate the use of empirical research methods in philosophical work that we should do all the work ourselves. There are a lot of empirical disciplines who study science, with which we could collaborate as well. It might be sort of division of labor. There is cooperation, of course, with history. I think that's the most evidence. There's a whole tradition in French philosophy of historical epistemology going back to the 19th century that history and philosophy of science from early on there's in the analytic tradition the integrated history and philosophy of science movement who also does that collaborative work. There's sociology of science with which we can work, science and technology studies. There's cytometrics. Often referred to now as the signs of science. We try to assemble data about scientific literature and citation and all these things. And we find it strange that up to now these collaborations seem to be rare. So there's an important paper by Fortinato et al. about the signs of science. It's mostly focused on synthometrics, but it refers to interdisciplinary work on science and it refers to all disciplines studying science except philosophy of science. So it talks about we do the digital work, we have to work with people who work on concepts, like the sociologists, but we exist as well, but they don't seem to be aware of our existence. This is a paper in science and it has been cited more than 8,000 times, I believe. There is an impact problem with philosophy of science and we should maybe practically try to build links and try to work together with other scientists rather than doing everything ourselves and staying isolated. But the fundamental question I want to raise today is in which ways can empirical information be useful in solving what are philosophical problems, whatever that may be. And I will use my research or our research project as a test case because we've been trying to do that actually in sort of empirical philosophy of science. Actually there's two research projects, one in Hasseltale 11, to which I work and then one in here, in the center, in Yusuf Vah, which is hosted by Professor Pencer, which is more on digital humanities, but they try to answer the same research questions and they fit very well together. And so the projects are about biological taxonomy, so everything that is classification in biology, the discovery of species, the description of species, classification of species, genera, etc. And the starting point is that there is actually much disagreement in biological taxonomy, so a lot of people are not really aware of that, but taxonomists really often disagree about which groups we should recognize a species, about what species are theoretically about, they disagree about everything, so it's very conclusively interesting. We want to know what the causes are of that disagreement, but also the consequences because it's important, for example, for nature conservation, for policy making to have clear species lists. I mean, if we want to protect biodiversity, we have to know which species exist, but if there are multiple conflicting lists, then that's very confusing for policy makers who have to somehow pick the best list, but they're not really equipped to do so. So we want to study the consequences of a taxonomic disagreement, and then we want to think on solutions. How can we reduce this agreement and try to find consensus among taxonomists or mitigate the potential negative consequences? And so one question we ask is, how can empirical philosophy play a role in answering these questions? To give a more concrete example of a taxonomic disagreement, there's the Orchid Genus Office, which are really cool plants, actually. They are plants that mimic insects, and they get pollinated by what is called pseudo-copulation. So the plant mimics a female insect, and it emits pheromones, attracting male insects who try to copulate with the plants in vain, of course. And by going from one to another, they spread the polyp. So it's really a landmark genus in biology. It was also studied by Darwin, who actually didn't believe that it could work as an evolutionary strategy. So he was really breaking his mind of this. And taxonomists are doing that as well, because the different classifications that exist vary from recognizing only 10 species, so putting a lot of diversity in very big species to classifications that recognize over 350 species. So they are very split as they are called in biology. They recognize every single variation as a separate species. But of course, if I have to make a conservation plan for office, then which units do I have to recognize? It makes a lot of difference, because of course these 350 small species, they are much rarer than the big species, so they are much more endangered. The taxonomy does have an impact. And so we actually wrote a paper about the causes of disagreement in office. There are many underlying points on which the taxonomists disagree on how evolution works in office, on how species concepts, on what species actually are, or many valuing things to become clear further on. But so just to give you an example of taxonomy disagreement and how it exists. And so here again we want to know what are the reasons behind this conflict and how can we solve it. So to tackle this problem, not only in office, but in general, we have used a diverse methodological toolbox because we did that in conceptual work and empirical work that is either qualitative and qualitative. So some of the qualitative things would qualify as traditional naturalistic philosophy of science or philosophy of science in practice that is focused on the case studies and so we can discuss whether it's empirical or not, but it is, let's say, naturalistic. And so there are three main research questions. We want to map taxonomy, disordering, or disagreement. We want to know how much disagreement is there actually where is it situated, is it in certain groups of organisms or is it just in general? Then we want to know the drivers of taxonomic disorder and disagreement and what are the causes and solutions. So you see, I'm going to go into all of the research, which you see in here, trying to tackle this problem from a very methodologically diverse perspective. I will just develop one example to illustrate this. So several of our research lines focus on birds and currently there are four global checklists of bird species. So as I said, there are different list of species and they are all used by different actors, so they are all relevant. But there's a lot of disagreement between these lists and okay, we want to understand how that is possible. The first question is, as I said, we have to map the disagreement, we have to find out how much disagreement there is, where it's situated. But it brings both conceptual and empirical questions because what is disagreement actually from when does different positions qualify as disagreement? Are there different kinds of disagreement? How can we measure disagreement? Not so easy as they sound. How can we quantify it? And then there's the empirical part and it's coupled with how much disagreement is there. So luckily all these different bird lists are brought together in a unique database. It's Avibase, so it's a really cool feature that exists only for birds because they are the best studied group of organisms. And it's actually a database that contains all classifications linked to its own backbone so that you can compare the different classifications and see how units recognized by classification 1 relate to units recognized by classification 2. Not going to go into the technical details. But of course if you have this data you can quantify conflict by looking in how many cases, how many cases, what is recognized as species differs on one classifier or another. We found that there are 12,889 unique things recognized as species by at least one list. We found that there's a discrepancy of more than 1,000 species in the number of species recognized. So there's one list that recognizes 1,000 more species than the other which is significant. Again, if you have to develop a conservation plan, if you want to study avian diversity, there's 1,000 species that appear out of the blue so it's significant out of around 10,000 species depending on the list again. And so there's only full disagreement about 62% of the concepts recognized as species. So that's data we now have. And we can then link that data to geography, to habitats we found that there's more disagreement about birds that occur in forests than birds that occur in other habitats. There's more disagreement in some reaches in Eastern Asia, for example. So that's very interesting data. Now we can start mapping disagreement and we can find hotspots of disagreement and then it gives us a roadmap for further investigations. So here's an overview of a screenshot of Avibes. So Tito Alba, the barn hole in English, I think, is one species about which all lists have a different position. So they all recognize different populations as being part of Tito Alba. So it can be visualized easily on Avibes. Here you see the taxonomic concepts, so really visible on screen. It's like a set of populations that is uniquely defined and then you can see where, which set a list recognizes as species. So very interesting. So we know how much disagreement there is. We can find it geographically, we can find it biologically. But of course the most interesting question is why do taxonomists disagree so often? And there are many hypothesis about that. A lot of philosophical literature that makes a lot of assumptions might be related to different views of what species actually are because species is a special concept of which brings many fields of difficulties. It can be because there are different views on the role of taxonomy. For example, where the taxonomy needs to incorporate the view of its uses in its decision making. It can be related to different methods, values, interpretation. But of course we see hypothesis about the causes of taxonomy disagreeing require empirical testing. Ideally we should be able to look at taxonomist minds. One problem is that in taxonomy in general they provide very little methodological information or very little information on their reasoning. So you need to be creative in acknowledging their assumptions and their ways of thought. But there are some ways we have found. So there are four checklists of bird species but there is currently a working group of avian checklists with representatives of all the lists and without avian taxonomist that is trying to unify these four lists in one single list that should be the only global authority about bird species. They do so by discussing all the conflicts all the around 1000 conflicts and by voting on a solution which they do on a github form on that form they give their opinions and justified and then they vote and they gave us access to that github form so we have so that allows us to get much closer on their reasoning because there they justify their votes so that's much more honest methodological information than you would find in the published material. We are trying to quantify types of reasons taxonomist use in decision making and in justifying their votes. Here is some an illustration of preliminary data. For example, morphological evidence is the largest category of reasons so that's contrary to what many may think that classification is mostly the non-genetics now but it isn't. Morphology is still very important then it's all by molecular evidence vocal evidence but we also find a lot of other reasons and arguments they use. Authority arguments arguments of conservatism and uncertainty but we don't know because we don't recognize this as because we don't have enough data that kind of arguments so this is very interesting because we get insight in their reasoning and we can quantify it because there's a thousand cases this is based on 110 cases but it's our goal to have much more and this gives us valuable information about reasons behind taxonomy decision making that we would otherwise not have. Another way in which we try to quantify to assess and quantify reasons behind taxonomy decision making is with a vignette study so a vignette study is more or less a study in which you present different parts of the study population with a text that is slightly different with versions of a text that is slightly different to see if the difference has any effect in their reaction to the text so we made three abstracts fictional abstracts of newly discovered species and we made different versions to present to a group of taxonists we had 500 respondents so that's quite big actually we did for example a case of plants and in one version it was just a plant that was newly discovered with morphological information and in the other version there was information that the plant was probably critically endangered and in need of protection to see if they would more easily accept the version with the conservation information because one hypothesis that conservation guides taxonomy decision making among taxonomists from low income countries as you can see here have an effect so yes is when they accepted the abstract as sound it's much higher for the abstract where the species is cited as threatened time for a neutral abstract and there was also one in which it was said that it was opponent and probably not threatened at all we also had a case on frogs just a morphological basis and now one version with genetic data one version with habitat data etc to see if that extra evidence needs to higher acceptance so we're still analyzing ourselves so can't discuss much but it's a very interesting way I think also to assess the drivers of taxonomy decision making and things that do make a difference convincing taxonomists of either recognizing something as a species or not then there's the digital humanities side of which I don't know a lot so if you have questions about it I will deflect it to the expert but what has been done is there's been a lot of work that's been put in a corpus of 35,000 taxonomist papers that have been assembled and that have been made available to through SAIVARE a program that Professor Pence made which allows their analysis and of course this tool gives a lot of quantitative data about taxonomic literature that can support traditional case studies which are much more restrictive the scope we can see how in this corpus that is thought to be representative about how taxonomic effort is distributed are there more papers about let's say bird taxonomy than about we can look for patterns of methodology of species concepts we can look for virtually anything in this so this will also prove promising tool in the future to get to know more about taxonomy and to answer the research questions and that is of course the solutions part we have told that there is a lot of disagreement in bird taxonomy we have talked about this we know how much disagreement we are in the situation we know the drivers of it but then we have to do as philosophers also a bit of normative work of course and here to the working group taxonomy is very interesting because I mean is it justified to just vote on scientific controversies not everyone accepts that and certainly in taxonomy which is a very individualistic discipline by origin it can't strike as strange that there are now let's say politicizing the work by just resolving all controversies and all conflicts which are often created by a vote so that's of course a normative question we have now finished the paper in which we have analyzed that question because voting was and is used in several other cases as well to settle similar conceptually and classificatory disputes we have analyzed this to see whether it could work in taxonomy as well there is the delisting of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the disempowering American psychiatrist association in 1973 which was a usually controversial vote there has been the vote on the definition of plans in 2006 and the planetary stages of Pluto also a controversial vote and there is the common use of voting in geology in the building of the international chronostatic graphic chart geological time units they are set by voting it's very interesting to see how that works and what we can learn from this example and me in general defend the use of voting with some caveats also for taxonomy so that to illustrate how the descriptive and normative work does interact in our research so that's of course the whole thing about voting is a conceptual normative work and you could present the idea of empirical philosophy like that we do first some descriptive work in which we apply empirical methods and then afterwards we do conceptual work on the normative part but we believe that there is also some empirical work that can be done in the normative part mainly in testing of normative principles of solutions and in bringing normative work closer to science because it's also an observation we do a lot of, we make a lot of normative claims in philosophy of science but they are rarely followed by science itself or put in practice so there's a problem there as well that maybe imprimicizing our normative work in some ways can help to solve problems one example so our project is also already in Hasselt University and the Zoology Lab in Hasselt is specialized in flat worms I don't know if people are acquainted with flat worms but they are as the name says small ecosystems, they are also big flat worms mainly the parasitic ones like the flukes anyhow, they are worms and one of these worms is as you know I think say my photos which is species complex and there's been so it's currently recognized as one species that is cosmopolitan that can be found virtually anywhere in the soil of aquatic ecosystems but since the 70s there have been papers saying this is more than one species we need to split this up because there's an awful lot of variation within it but no one has done it until now because they didn't dare to because there were enough data so very strange things in more than 50 years of we need to split this but it has never been done and there has been research in Hasselt that has found that has tested different taxonomic methods for heretics in my field it is and using morphological data they found we need to split this in 15 species then they used a genetic method and that said I don't know we have to split this in 62 species and then there's another genetic method and it's saying no no we need to split this in 78 species okay what do we need to do now it's a very big problem of course because I mean what is the best split we can make and the traditional approach that is currently popular is then to say we need to do integrative taxonomy that's a new fashionable thing in taxonomy mostly as a means to save like essentialistic monistic taxonomy if we integrate all these conflicting data we will come with a unique solution but we have various fields of conceptual problems with that integrative taxonomy because I mean it never specifies how they are going to integrate the way in which you do of course impact the outcome so actually it's it just pushes problem forward you have to make choice because there are conflicts between the taxonomy methods it's a bit an illusion to think that if you just throw it all together so with now we want to use our philosophical critique of integrative taxonomy to try to solve this problem and to come to a split that will be that is sensible, that is philosophically sound and that will be accepted by the rather small but still existing flatware community and so we are now working on that but it will be really it would be nice if we could use our conceptual work in the actual taxonomic work and publish it in the biological paper so that's our goal here and then that way we can test our philosophical solutions or alternatives for integrative taxonomy testing in a sort of way our normative normative work to see if it works for a difficult case like chaotic semi-feudalities the same way it offers so yeah, some people agree that if we can't agree on a single classification then we should use digital tools to make the relations between all conflicting classifications more clear a bit like afi-based does because as I said afi-based only exists for a few hours so for many other groups we have no clue of how different taxonomies relate to each other which species of the one that belong to species of the other or who they overlap over so taxonomic alignment is now being developed to build these relations so we supporting that conceptually but we also want to test it for our office we want to try to build such a taxonomic alignment and find out the relations between different office classifications as a test case for our social views on taxonomic alignment so that's another way in in which we try to accurately test our normative principles but this is all real philosophy and I said that's a question we are regularly got from it many people they accept our methodology for solving this taxonomic problem but they argue that it's not really philosophical problem it's a scientific problem that we try to solve and while empirical methods may be useful to do that this is not empirical philosophy because it's not philosophy at all of course you could ask do we care if this is philosophy or not maybe we shouldn't and maybe that's just a stupid question there's no real value in having to predicate our philosophy the question is whether we try to tackle a society relevant problem but of course if you say I don't care whether this is philosophy then you can ask the question are we philosophers then the people who should get paid to do this work or are they people that are better qualified than philosophers to do it if it's not philosophy of course if you frame it like that and if you see the problem of taxonomy disorder or disagreement as a purely scientific problem so to an existing debate on what is referred to as philosophy in science there are some people who argue that we should do philosophy in science like use philosophical methods to solve scientific problems rather than doing only self-interested philosophy on science for our own agenda but there are other people who say that philosophy in science is no philosophy so that's an ongoing debate in literature to which our questions here relate actually. One observation of course is that taxonomic issues do occur quite prominently on the philosophical agenda so that's an argument to say that it's not a mere scientific problem while it is also a scientific problem there is a lot of philosophical interest in taxonomy and mainly about the concept of species so there has been a lot of philosophical work done on the concept of species or what they are ontologically are species kinds but some people argue that they are individuals are they natural kinds or other types of kinds and on the other side on what species are biologically are they and that relates to the so-called species concept like the biological species concept which says that species are reproductively isolated groups of organisms who also have an ecological species concept that say that species are groups of ecologically differentiated organisms there's phylogenetic species concept so it links species to history so any audience so there's two ways in which the questions of what species are can be can be asked in a way these are very traditional so practical what is X questions what are species questions so called this could have asked if he would have been interested in biology and so one question we can ask is whether these questions are useful to solve the scientific problem of taxonomy disagreement the philosophy of in science perspective is our work on philosophical work on what are species useful for the scientific side and then we can ask the question is all this empirical material that we have assembled is it useful to answer these traditional socratic what are species questions let's first look at the role of conceptual work in solving the scientific problem the philosophy in science perspective one observation is that species concept whether they are implicit or explicit whether taxonomists reflect on them or apply them implicitly let's say do play a role in taxonomy decision making so ideas of what species are which may be made explicit or which may not do play a role in the limiting species that sounds fairly evident you can't describe species if you don't know what species if you don't have an idea about what species are so that seems a place where philosophy can play a role they mean engineering these concepts and you say the concept of species you use there is not fully consistent or it's not fully applicable in that context etc and another finding of our research is that taxonomic research process are guided by many values and assumptions that are often that often remain implicit another role philosophy can have is in making these values and assumptions explicit and in guiding debates on their legitimacy and on trade-offs between them debates with which taxonomists often struggle so that's another role philosophy we could have in in solving the problem of taxonomy disorder and then there is of course a normative side of things what does the best possible taxonomy look like it's something philosophy of science can reflect about it's our job so philosophy can play a role in our opinion in improving taxonomic research practices so to answer the question of whether philosophy can contribute to solving the problem of taxonomy disorder whether it is a philosophical problem or not is in our view yes and then there is the other side of the question can empirical data inform conceptual research and can it be useful even for the philosophical agenda the very metaphysically framed what are species questions we also think yes because one important thing in my view was species concepts and concepts of species which is a different thing you could say are concepts in our ideas there are concepts that emerge from scientific practice if we wouldn't have science we wouldn't have the concept of species so if you want to understand that concept it seems more or less evident that you need also to understand the practice and I think that also counts for the philosophical agenda and I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to do species related metaphysics in the void by just not referring to science or biological reality at all so I think that's a way in which our empirical work can be useful for the what are species questions also philosophically and another observation is of course that in scientific practice concepts are met with a lot of practical constraints in their operationalization I mean you don't use a concept directly you have to operationalize it if you use a biological species concept so which says that species are reproductively isolated groups of organisms you have to find ways in which to assess whether groups of organisms are reproductively isolated so there's a whole lot of yeah operational work to be done to put concepts in practice and this that side these constraints, these practical constraints in our view are very difficult to capture with purely conceptual work so you do need empirical work on the functioning of taxonomy to get into that side of the problem and then as I already explained we find that normative solutions as well are met with a lot of practical constraints they do need to be operationalized to be used and knowledge about scientific practice is vital to produce sufficiently concrete normative principles that are working and that relates again to the question of impact if we want our normative work to be used we need to link it closely to the scientific reality so these are reasons to believe that our empirical data is useful for conceptual work both when it is aimed at the scientific agenda or when it is aimed at the fields of the agenda I think to illustrate the same thing in another way I think that the science of taxonomy or the discipline of taxonomy illustrates very well how there is a gradual flow between concepts and scientific practice we have concepts but the way in which they are used to practice is through a flow of practical considerations and constraints and you need to understand that whole spectrum from a concept to a formal taxonomic scientific decision to understand the problem and again I think that's true for both the scientific agenda and the philosophical agenda and of course to understand that whole flow from concept to practical decision you do need conceptual and empirical work linked together so just to end we observe that many people in our sentence and that's both for the Luvela website and for the Leuven site there are people who are exploring the use of empirical philosophy in their work so we think that it's time to reflect on how we can formalize and support the tendency how can we for example share methodological knowledge and resources on how to do empirical work things like this video study it's not really easy to design such as study so you do need a lot of methodological information if we can pull that together I mean it's not really productive if everyone finds that out on his or her own so maybe we can pull knowledge within institutes and share it how can we promote collaboration with other science studies another important topic I think because as I said it's virtually inexistent now can we provide funding for empirical work will we be able to convince funders of philosophy to fund empirical work within philosophy that's I'm not sure of that so we should reflect on how to do that we can for example learn empirical philosophies as a way to promote it and I think we also have to reflect on how to incorporate notions of empirical philosophy in the education because if you really want this to become a thing you need to make students enthusiastic about it and get them acquainted with empirical philosophy so it might be included in some courses it might be seen as part of philosophical skills even that we teach there can be a seminar on empirical philosophy I don't know for MA students so these are just some ideas on how we can amplify this tennis in which in our view we see a school and that's what I had to say so I'm interested if there are any questions if anything was unclear or if you have our opinions we often do it since we have time yeah, yeah, alright, make a video maybe not stupid question about taxonomy the way we did we understand taxonomies kind of classification with class and subclasses but maybe this is not the way we can utilize it maybe we can think in terms of networks with correlation between species it can be useful too in order to measure biodiversity besides a list of species of course it's easier for a politician to think oh we have so many disappeared species but I think we can be strong indicators without this is a really using classes or I mean maybe not but I would like to address the question because maybe we can be more doubtful about this yeah, I I agree that we should be open about whether we how much do we need to care about the traditional way in which taxonomy is done the system which goes back to lineers and there are many other ways to characterize by diversity I agree with that and I would as a philosopher I would also be fairly radical if taxonomies isn't the code system that we just need to get rid of it of course again we can say that as we always but taxonomists generally are very conservative and most biologists are conservative in the way in which they receive classification and biologists so these calls to radically modify or change or replace the system they are very met with a lot of hostility so I do think that it's useful to find less radical ways to improve the existing systems but there are interesting philosophical cases that are made to abolish the rank of species for example because now the system is built about the species being something special I could just say that we have a bi-diversity that can be grouped in different groups at different levels of the test no need to find one level that is special but even that is very negatively met in a biological audience so I would be careful with radical proposals and also we can find ways to characterize bi-diversity if we want to let's say that there is an area in which we want to do a development we want to know how much bi-diversity there is to see if we need to protect that area or not then we can just go there we take some samples from the environment from water for example or soil we sequence all the DNA and we quantify how many genotypes are present without knowing to what they refer necessarily do they represent species do they represent unknown species maybe so that's the perfect way to do it but of course you will will that be enough to get the biologists on your site will that be enough to get the policy world on your site is it enough to make policy on genotypes or do we need some sort of natural kinds to have them legally represented I'm not sure but I think morally and legally there is a desire to have sufficiently elaborated informal species that are to give them moral standing or to give them legal rights in conservation you need sufficient grounding of the units you use I don't know if that's an answer to your question may I ask an answer I have a question is that the rule of philosophy to make some critiques about the main concept in science and maybe that will make a difference between the pure empirical scientist analysis and your because you can say ok here can be an answer with species you can also have the critiques about the concept of species are you involved more in this technique in ocean I don't know if it's part of your of your work this kind of critique but of course it's a political choice of what we say to biologists and what we say to philosophers and what we publish in philosophy journals it's more radical than what we publish in biologists that's a political thing it is our explicit goal to be normative to criticize what needs to be criticized to improve taxonomy that's the end goal but yeah it's maybe anecdotical but so I'm doing my PhD partly in in the zoology lab where I'm the philosophy guy that's how they refer to me and I did criticize some of their work there was they were waiting a research proposal for the FWO it's the touch FNS and told Diabo we are going to have a discussion about it and I give my criticism on that project and in the end they didn't submit it so I was so grotesque who destroyed the whole project so yeah you have to be careful and I I felt really bad because my contribution was very negative but yeah so of course we do have the aim to be critical because that's what we are as philosophers but there are political and diplomatic limits in how you apply that in scientific practice when you're doing what they call philosophy insights you have to acknowledge the feelings of scientists I have a question about in yet study because I think I didn't understand what you did and were you trying to say that when there was a conservation worry they tended to judge that it was a new species in this case but actually because I feel like there could just be probability thinking that if you find a new species and there is a lot of example of that species I mean it's unlikely that it's a new species because it sounds just weird to discover something that is very common now so maybe it's not concerned and explanation to dive this is what I mean just a number of things in conservation but in the non-conservation version of the abstract there is no reference to how many there are but usually it's threatened threatened there are less items I feel like maybe there is a probability thinking like the prior probability but you could also say if there are only a few individuals it is less likely that it's a fully new species it might be a variation of something existing so you could also turn the argument not because it could be that you didn't find enough that it's likely that you have no chance you have no chance to discover it before alone it can play a role here was that it's a common hypothesis in philosophical literature about taxonomy that conservation plays a role in taxonomic dishes making which many taxonomists say that's not the case at all and that's not legitimate so we wanted to test that hypothesis or that assumption that claim and so that's why we made one abstract so which is neutral which is explicit there is no extinction risk and one which is explicit has a high extinction risk but actually for high income countries there wasn't a difference so the hypothesis is falsified for high but for low income countries which is a lower smaller sound movie there was it could be interesting to distinguish between the writing part and the smaller number part to see if it's different or the same yeah that would be probably interesting as an extra test to see what the dynamic because there are some people that have thought about that in you know they had a lot of time but the fact that sometimes you don't have all the you have missing data and so you make assumptions based on that so if something is writing as a species it's possible that it's writing but also possible in missing some data yeah that's interesting it would be interesting to just so I think in general because our sample of high income countries has no effect of these different abstracts so that it doesn't matter I don't think that thanks for coming I'm interested in the metaphysical modification which you just said you said that metaphysical science was a sense of originality and understanding practices and I agree with that but now I'm wondering what you think how you view metaphysics in your project because I think you have a great case against like a moralistic or fundamentalist metaphysics because if you talk about taxonomy taxonomy is a disagreement among scientists and you have to practices and you have to stand on that either you have to resolve this clearly if I was going to shut down just voting to choose one taxonomy or liberalist in both cases but not describing the fundamental nature of it it's saying how you project yourself in writing your project metaphysics is more conscious or more like non-realistic the way we do metaphysics in science at least that wasn't the way that you thought I would argue that we are not fundamentally anti-realistic but our main tenet would be that there are many ways in which the real world clusters in kinds and that the kinds that we actually work with are dependent on what our scientific aims are on our values and assumptions and our scientific aims so we have to be nuanced about we are not pluralists or relativists any classification is useful depending on what we want and we can just know but there are different sensible ways in which we can classify reality there are also ways which aren't sensible but to pick among the many sensible ways of classifying reality is a context dependent, value dependent or goal dependent thing and that might include voting or let's say less scientific or tradition scientific methods if we go back to the offerings case there are these usually discrepant classifications but arguably they are all the limiting or targeting some sort of natural kinds these pre-onected 15 micro species and the 10 micro species are all natural kinds but they are based on different ways to model reality or to emphasize if you say we want species to be reproductively isolated groups and you are recognizing kinds that have a reality that's not something we invent they are reproductively isolated groups in the world but if you just use morphological groups for example you can get different groups but they are as real as so there is a realistic constraint on the way how we perceive taxonomy but there is also pluralistic I don't know if that No, I find some of that is great then from the metaphysics the definition doesn't say that it's realist and there is a lot of fantasy and it would be hard for most people to understand that there are realist metaphysics because if you are saying that natural kinds depends on what you want to do describing a fundamental reality of the world is occurring how you see how you see reality from a certain point of sense is to just actually find that stuff Maybe we have very open-minded ways of thinking about metaphysics much more traditional sensibilities in metaphysics but I have to agree that the aim of our project is not metaphysical so we haven't really gone in depth on that side of the issues but I do think that our results are useful for metaphysical debates about species but that's for metaphysicists to decide in order they want to use it I have two questions, my first question is so this is obviously empirical philosophy but it's not empirical about the world it's empirical about scientists of course also about the world scientists live in the world it's not like half philosophy half biology, it's more like half sociology of biology and philosophy from the way you describe it but it seems to me that to get this project completely of the ground and very productive you also might need to do actual biology work test certain features of plants and so on or would this really be a completely different line of research because it matters not the empirical data you have is just what scientists are doing and what they are publishing and so on, never data about the world about the biological world yeah, well that's maybe because of the emphasis of this presentation we fundamentally see it as philosophy of science and then our study object is science and indeed the world as studied by science so that's why all these things are in need about science but we do use the biological data as well when we're for the Flatworm project for example I mean we work with actual flatworms in the lab to test our work and for offers as well for the alignment so it is our ambition to do and how exactly do they in those two where does the biology work exactly interesting because like in this pluralistic idea because the biology is the most important constraint on your concepts and if you want concepts to work then they should fit with the biological reality that's I think the most important way of finding the antics not just the way scientists are talking about the biological reality but I think that's fundamentally important so yes now that is a central part of our research or of what our research should be of course this doing biological research is more expensive so to get our actual data it's not always easy to be an equal part of our work maybe and that becomes the immersion of the presentation I agree with could there be a sort of threat if you want to do both in the sense that if you look at science and you kind of see like this is for scientists more important then you're sort of neutral you have this like perspective from the outside and you can like investigate what their logic is well if you're in it yourself too then you might want to push more the biology direction you've developed into like if you're a genetic have you generated a genetic background then you might have a client bias that is not justified by the project itself more by your background and why it's really written towards genetic classifications you know what I mean like the neutrality of the outsider position who looks at the scientists or philosophers or sociologists seems to have some advantage too yeah I agree I I mean most of the people on our project aren't biologists so we do have that distance by nature by not being a biologist I studied a bit of biologists so I could maybe be biased but the others are much less and I do want to emphasize that by getting more closer scientific practice you can make better criticism by knowing how it actually works but with these data these data don't bias us but they are not they give more concrete evidence it's different maybe it's in practice not different actually it seems different to be close to know practice very well or to know the domain very well that seems to be at least theoretically different idea you can in principle study scientists like their bees or something very carefully and know very well the behavior of these bees they are studying they could be solipsistic they are doing something and you are studying it or you could very well know have objects knowledge or relation to the thing they are studying I agree I think that it's a relevant distinction but I would then argue that you need both kinds of knowledge to to reach the goals of this project in full and that relates to our see my realistic structuralistic view of how the constraints of reality and how the practice of scientists fuse together in taxonomy that somehow appears so I don't think that if we accept that distinction that both kinds of knowledge are and that we like I agree in the knowledge of the domain itself that there is a risk of bias but I don't think that risk outweighs the advantages of having biologists and having biological knowledge and of course we are a project with people from different backgrounds so that gives a protection against biases from all directions we have one of my advice is an actual veteran taxonomist so he brings in different knowledge but indeed he is let's say that his normative views are covered by his opinionated I hope he's not watching this you don't want my opinionated biological colleagues that's not helpful if you're a philosopher so we need you need the balance but his knowledge is actually quite valuable even if it's correctly written and she doesn't disagree at all I would add maybe perhaps you get correctly but being an outsider on your project because you mentioned that if they start doing the experiment themselves it might become well driven to prove or defend one of the opinions that before they were integrated was just another opinion and they were neutral to it and now they would sort of embrace it more for me I would just think that the neutral position doesn't exist even in this point now and this correct me if I'm wrong but at least by being in this project working together with the biologist there's the common assumption that in the taxonomical disorder is a good thing right so that's already a way in which they as outsiders are actually positioned so I I would question whether it's possible to in any way be neutral I mean I don't think it's super controversial but in a way it's not I mean there are many taxonomies to say we don't care now whether our work is unusable because we are so often disagreeing these disagreements are important and if we stop disagreeing then we stop being sound science and we don't care what policy magics no but I mean you and the group of philosophers we take a position in that there and that's what I think it's it's rich but not the detriment that you have a position which is right at least the assumption is that solving the taxonomical disorder is a valuable thing and related to this I have two questions which is when you were talking about the bird many database of birds right that there's a lot of disagreement between them my immediate question was why is the disagreement and could the context in which those databases are used explain to the disagreement for example I'm not sure but are there local or local regional databases aimed are they all aimed at conservation or are there some that are not conservation specific databases but are more just like bird watchers or a professional taxonomist and would those contextual differences help explain that difference and then my follow up question to that would be because it's something that you talk in your top but I think it's never explicitly addressed is why should we solve the taxonomical disagreement and it's not a historical question but why why is it important is it because we are aiming at having a sort of a global database in which global policymaking can happen so why is according to the project important to address this disagreement so the first question in which these lists coming to be is probably important in shaping them even just the people who are in the commissions that write lists they they are quite small groups of people like 10 people who make such a list and who decide on the list so even these individuals have a big influence on the end result there will be elements of tradition because how are these individuals recruited they are probably not going to recruit someone who is fundamentally methodologically different so yes that would be another area to investigate the historical context in which the existing lists have coming to be we haven't studied that there won't be something that could be done we are hoping to do that for the new list, the unified list so we are doing this quantitative part but we also would like to interview these people and like why the sort of history about how how the game calls to make a unified list why were there demands for having a unified list etc how did the process, how did the process go so it is still running so we can write as soon as it is being made but it would be very useful to do that for the four existing lists with time constraints for sure on the second question why do we want to solve the problem of taxonomy disorder because taxonomy is used by a lot of people who have certain demands of clarity and stability both within biology, I mean all biological research almost all have to be correct is structured around species and they want there to be one catalog of species most conservation legislations built around species in the US you have the Endangered Species Act it is all about the protection of species in Europe it is a bit different because you have habitat guidelines focused on habitats but yeah there is a societal demand to solve the problem of taxonomy which we recognize and because purely philosophically there is no need to maybe then I become overly pluralistic and relativistic there is no need to have one single list of species even if they would exist in reality but it's a societal demand to have a stable and clear catalog of life and society looks to taxonomy to provide it and taxonomy isn't providing it so I think that's the motivation but as I said many taxonomists don't feel that they have to provide that stable and clear catalog of life they say that's not our job we discuss by diversity we do it in very different ways so they wouldn't recognize that demand but we do because just forward what is it called? is it you calling it a disorder? no it's a stand call it cool I wrote the project you could say a segment you have to ask him I thought maybe he stole that from a biologist I think that's a quote from a biologist from one of these taxonomists because I have a philosophy of medicine and it's a fire of an air that is on a tunnel to segment the weather oh but it's not intended to have any medical connotations so it's a disorder in the sense of my my desktop being a disorder yeah there are a lot of terms that are going to be used like taxonomy to see this taxonomic energy taxonomy yeah the exact etymology I am not a there are a lot of elements to the yeah it's true yeah but we do have that fundamental methodology some aspects of taxonomy so they at least are prepared from a societal perspective yeah and that's if I can follow up on because when you speak of society to demand um what comes to mind is that precisely how those those databases are actually used right because so if I understand some database might have for example a bias towards um let's say, I don't know if this is the case but us bit birds for example and another one might have a bias towards the defying birds in the goons near the goons um but if those databases are used in those contexts the fact that the database for American birds is used in the US for US regulation um should have made this already a problem right? in the same way that this university is organized in a certain way to follow certain functions let's say it follows those functions and that's well another university splits the philosophy department as closer to the biology department and this one closer to the the literature department you can say that it follows certain functions but the fact that we have a organizational disagreement is not necessarily a problem because they have the answer local needs and local functions so that's why I asked the beginning about really the function of these databases how they are used whether locally they follow that function right? first I would argue that in most cases it is just not clear what organization or fundamental principles behind specific databases or lists are we don't know what biases they have what aims in mind they were explicitly or explicitly constructed so that would be one thing we need to assess second all these lists have lay claim to universality it would be a whole different story if taxonomists would say yeah this classification is context specific it is specifically constructed with these aims in mind based on these methodological principles that's what they do they all claim that their classification is the correct classification it should be context independent so again and third that's something we might criticize as well the demand of society of policy makers is not to have context specific classification between a universal classification that might be wrong but that's I think the policy makers is one species that exists and if we any caveats we make it might if you take a relative disposition and say these species they are constructed then they would say we have to invest money to protect constructs so that's and also uses of taxonomists they don't often reflect on why they do switch lists or database they just take the first and finally take it so should that all be different than it might be right that we should indeed use built context specific lists use them in the right context that would be ideal from both sides and society has this design for universality that is actually quite strong so that's right the bad part of this disorder is not the side of philosophical interpretation it's the side of people mistakingly taking the taxonomy to be universality and defining reality so it is not a problem philosophical speaking it's a problem of communication and how we are not explicit but there are pragmatic reasons to be different yeah they are but the problem is we think that there are that there is a universal list of species and then we find that there are actually many list of species conflicts of course but as you said philosophy speaking as we should as we recognize this is grammatically defined by the issues we are speaking to the constraints when one in the other taxonomy is just what we want to do and the philosophy I said I don't see the bad thing in this disorder no that's true I agree a die-hard essentialist would say philosophically speaking taxonomy disorder is a problem because what scientists do is metaphysically unsound I don't agree with that no the problem of taxonomy disorder as a problem is only societally relevant that I agree but I do think that it is maybe not a problem in philosophy but it is because it challenges I mean the whole mess of taxonomy is an important challenge let's say and stress test for metaphysical accounts of kinds and classifications of universal species and whatever so it's not a problem for philosophy but it's relevant I was going to say you had a second question I thought so I'm a logician I wonder whether in interesting logic being done or on such voting concepts because they seem very interesting and to some extent it seems like I was very biased the answer of such a project because you want to solve this order and solving this order that's mainly creating a functional logic to cope with concepts that seem coherent so has there been any formal work being done in voting concepts I mean concepts that are the results of voting and how would that work it's kind of a fuzzy logic I assume well not in this context I think there's little work on the use of voting insights actually but of course there's a lot of logical and mathematical work in voting theory so you can I think fairly easily apply that to this but in my to my knowledge that's not yet been explorable with how that would work out in science I'm not sure that the voting theories are going to do much because what you really want here is sort of semantic approach so your idea is like is working like working with the concepts that result from voting while taking into account the fact that they have come into existence via the vote so you have I mean something is such a species if it aggregates I mean the right kind of evidence a few meters and then doing a vote over that I don't know you almost could imagine trying to get people to adopt something that would feel that would be kind of para-consistent in the sense of like well yeah but I mean because you could get to weird cases where like I don't know I can't get to a decent example where the majority voting results in concepts that look like A and B but then there's a certain kind of inference that you take from those two concepts where actually when you unpack the votes what were otherwise the minority votes combined in such a way that it's not the inference that you would expect from A and B it's actually a different inference yeah so that's the kind of problems you are looking at is indeed coherent theories that are then voted over often you get an inconsistent a theory out of it voting does not conserve internal structure yeah that's for sure so when they started the voting in the avian working group they said are we not going to use a species concept or any methodological principle we are just going to vote on a case-by-case basis but then you get of course inconsistent outcomes yeah because sometimes in some cases they will interpret evidence in favor of splitting while in other cases they will detective that and they are becoming aware of that because now during the process they say no we don't need any technical guidelines to ensure at least a degree of consistency so that is certainly a problem and I mean you have small majority sometimes so you do even if you would apply these guidelines you would get inconsistent outcomes that's the price you pay but of course in the semantics of the concepts you get out of voting you could say that yeah we need to do a lot of work on what these concepts as results of voting actually mean but of course in another way their meaning is already fixed because they vote on conceptual designs which are already yeah yeah sure existing in the debate but then you have to check which inference rules and so on that gives but you can do it as signs that is based on things that are defined in this way in the semantics the work is kind of already done but it doesn't it's not clear to me at least what kind of like aggregated picture this gives in terms of inference rules and so on that scientifically use yeah I agree and I think no one knows and it will become clear when the list is ready I guess but it's an interesting topic for further study because we can I think fairly strongly defend the use of voting from the perspective of existing taxonomic disagreements and problems it brings but in need for future work and whether the outcome of voting is can be used in the future inference and that's a question to explore that's a good transition that's actually a question to that I just wanted to get you to say a little more about the voting results because it seems really cool so what were your you mentioned you got into some kind of rules of thumb about like what made the voting in the taxonomic case is defensible whereas in other cases it might not work so well and like some cautions so like what did some of that look like I don't think I've heard about the project that's really cool we just submitted I can share it as a preprint the basic idea is that whether you need there's a basic trade-off in concepts between the fact that we need to use the best possible concepts in science and that can only be if there is conceptual debate and criticism possible and on the other side we need to use ideally the same concepts in science because we need to communicate we need to collaborate so that's a trade-off fundamental trade-off which is very apparent in taxonomy because taxonomists want their concepts their species to represent something about the world and to tell something about the outcome of evolution and that's a that are difficult scientific questions which need debate and criticism to to be solved with the young Hampton Biology we want to use species as means of communication and means of storing information of as stable difference so that is a trade-off in our view and in some cases that trade-off should be resolved in favor of the communicative side of the matter if these conceptual debates become regressive which they tend to do in taxonomy and they become like heated arguments with always the same arguments that are repeated then they can say these conceptual debates become regressive there will be a natural consensus because the different people in the debate have different violence and preferences and that it might be but that's of course something for the scientific community itself to decide there might be best to resolve trade-off in favor of communication and to use a system of what we call conceptual governance in which a scientific institution sets a conceptual standard that is ideally followed by so that's the first part of our argument and the second part is indeed that voting might be the best way to do that conceptual governance because if you install what we call conceptual governance it should be done in the best and most democratic manner and there are reasons to believe that voting systems are the most suited and alternative would be sort of system of deliberative democracy where you put all people together in a room until they find a consensus but we think that finding a consensus with a time limit leads to all things like coercion and baron dynamics and this literature on that while voting has a double advantage of solving a conflict rapidly because you have a direct resolution all while signaling disagreement if the votes are really split then it's clear that there is disagreement or uncertainty a valuable measure of disagreement all while solving the problem so that's one of the main advantages also if we acknowledge that different positions in conceptual debates are guided by different values and preferences then voting is the system to aggregate between conflicting values and preferences you can't deliberate yourself out of it that there is one rational optimum then deliberation might be better than we we think in these cases there isn't like in the case of homosexuality whether it's a mental disorder or not that's a value a value based question the definitions of a planet even we there are different positions where people from different from me with their own research interests and the concept of life they wanted depended on that so that's not there wasn't a rational optimum and we believe in taxonomy in many cases there is because there are many sensible positions so then voting seems the best way to enact conceptual governance and then the rest of the paper is about how to ensure that it's accepted because you need strategies that's what the case of the EPA and of Pluto learned they improvised their voting systems they were like oh we're having a conceptual crisis we're quickly organizing a vote I'm simplifying on and then of course there was a lot of criticism on process while in geology stratigraphy it exists this long time it's well established it's much more accepted so we we plead to use voting to use it in a way in an embedded way that comes together with the communication about why there is voting about strategies to increase the legitimacy but we haven't reflected on whether the products of the voting are actually usable that should be forming a paper if I may have a further question did you study the bias of the system of votes because I guess when you implement the votes for the scientific to results of the agreement did you study how the bias of how you implement the votes bias of the knowledge that you have before and is there a preferred system of votes like a majority of millions of us or like a majority of us or whatever system of votes there is another one that is rationally better I don't know if I get your question this is the same question as you have in the question of how you elect democratically there is always a bias in the system of votes to get votes so I was wondering if there is one system of votes that is better for centering the agreements that leads you to a more useful resolution in the question of how people are accepting do you vote on how closely to the truth you are getting we haven't reflected on that in detail in most cases they use simple majority voting and I don't feel that there are obvious reasons why my more complex systems would be better than mine you could say we need a 60% majority in the media I don't know how but it might of course bias for example in the working group the votes are open so they are not secret votes which is to be advised against for example because it can again lead to power dynamics they vote in an order but if all the others have already voted to split and that might influence your opinion it might make it less attractive to go against that for example so there are some conditions which you can think that good voting system should follow and if you argument against and embrace it is against the existence of power we do have some ideas but on the actual voting system I don't see big problem with simple majority voting if they are really multiple designs available then you could lose a system of alternative voting for example where you rank the options in preference because some might be for one option and prefer another as second and be against one very specifically but in most cases it's a binary choice and a simple majority of votes seems fine that seems to be I don't know if it's in the out of base case is that on purpose that they only try to have yes no votes or do they ever present like here's four ways we could split what does everybody think was that a they do have votes in which there are more options and then it's first plus the post but it's actually where they do try to present the conflicts in a way that is binary sometimes they split more complex cases to have binary choices probably easier to know what you think of course because if you have multiple options and first post system then the majority become very small and again get legitimacy and in many cases even if there are more than two options the votes tend to crystallize but the choice between two options and some options are just equal so sure and that's probably guided by the system of simple majority I was wondering what you think about another possible motivation for voting being a good option which I assume you won't like it, it's not realistic at all but I would like to know your opinion about it, namely that there really is a natural kind behind species it's just that we don't know we don't have no access to it or not yet and all these different approaches to biology are all trying to get at the real concept of species and there's an assumption that they approximated but that they're not there yet and so scientifically that would be the assumption, the physical assumption and a scientifically justified project would be to just like okay we don't know who's right here but somebody's right and the bigger groups are the ones who have probably more members and therefore they have been more convincing and so maybe they are already closer to the reality so let's just vote who's in the majority and then not judge try not to judge other groups but like get to the most the likely approaching of the truth then I know what you mean I agree there is political theory who justifies it's called epistemic democracy and the golden theorem and he said yeah we need voting not because we have different values and preferences to aggregate in politics but because everyone has idea about what is the societal optimum but we can be wrong about it but statistically it's more probably that the majority is right and so we have to vote because the majority has the biggest chance of being epistemically right and the first way in which we framed the voting thing was yeah we don't have to care about whether species about whether we are realists or nominalists because if we are realists we use the the majority of epistemic democracy and we say yeah taxonomist the majority of taxonomists is probably right about what the actual actual kind is and if it proves out that nominalism is right then we have our social choice theory about aggregating values and preferences so we have this double browning of voting because of simplicity because we also want the people to be able to read by the people using voting we have to move them discussion you are a deeply pragmatic person no this is just how you talk after you try to submit to biology journals five or six times and just get absolutely incinerated by the peer reviewers and then you start to talk like this this is just we all get here after a while but also many I think many political philosophies would be would see it as wrong that we just throw all these political theories together and say in this context that justification of democracy works and in that context and other works because they are yeah in political theory they are they are seen as incompatible so with me so that's also a very pragmatic use of political theory in our justification of voting so they are I think conceptual problems with the double structure but that was how it so I do I am sympathetic to epistemic democracy I didn't expect it to be well conditionally sympathetic conditionally sympathetic if you are going to be a realist I like conditional sympathy but you gave a picture of realism where all these are other natural kinds and I mean we just have to use one of them but all of them refer to natural kinds yeah but that isn't pretty fine in the vote so the vote actually is both about aspects of reality and about aspects of values because all options in theory are available to vote on and there are some options which should be voted against for reasons of constraints of reality and there should be other options that should be voted against for reasons of values so fundamentally I do believe that we should throw epistemic democracy and social choice theory together I haven't enough acquaintance of these theories of their sensitivities in political theory to confidently do that because they are seen as oppositional by many so maybe we are too fasting in really told together but I do I mean you do have a stronger case for voting if you can that voting both works in a realist context and in a normalist context but it would take more work to clarify to clear out the details the details so many context that works better and so many context that works better and you just find out what is the majority of context that's working and then you decide which is too much you could vote on I presented the voting thing in a conference in Germany and one of the questions I received was we can as philosophers argue for conceptual governance in science but would it actually work in philosophy and I didn't have an answer to that so we might because there are a lot of conceptual debates in philosophy as well which do hamper communication that's my view at least within philosophy we all have our ideas about what concepts mean and maybe we should indeed govern that and set collective standards and voting that way is there a societal demand for philosophers to get their governance together I don't know we should do a survey well is there any other questions because otherwise good can learn from one another next one perfect thanks so much