Abstract
I present and defend a novel version of the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) account of natural kinds. The core of the proposal is a development of the notion of co-occurrence, central to the HPC account, along information-theoretic lines. The resulting theory retains all the appealing features of the original formulation, while increasing its explanatory power, and formal perspicuity. I showcase the theory by applying it to the (hitherto unsatisfactorily resolved) problem of reconciling the thesis that biological species are natural kinds with the fact that many such species are polymorphic.
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Notes
“[T]he essence of a given natural kind is a set of intrinsic (perhaps unobservable) properties, each necessary and together sufficient for an entity being a member of that kind” (Wilson 1999, p. 188).
Among other things: in Boyd’s original presentation nine further clauses are introduced, some of them probably intended as further necessary conditions for the presence of an HPC. For our current purposes, the HPC view can be adequately characterised by providing analogues of the two conditions that follow.
At the relevant scale—strictly speaking they have all the structure of their component cells.
For brevity, in this paper I use “polymorphism” to refer to both polymorphism and polyphenism. Section “Polymorphism” provides a more careful characterisation of the phenomena that I will be calling “polymorphism”.
There is, though, one kind of phenomenon that fits the characterisation of polymorphism I have just given, which my proposal does not cover. A clear example is the following: many species of butterflies present mimicry-based polymorphism and, e.g., females of Papilio dardanus differ in wing colouration, in some fourteen (stable, discrete) varieties (see Joron and Mallet 1998 for details). The case of mimicry polymorphism is significantly different from any of the ones I have just enumerated. In the latter cases, one and the same homeostatic mechanism brings about all of the morphs; in the mimicry case, the different morphs are brought about by slightly different, but overlapping, homeostatic mechanisms. This is mirrored in the fact that, while there is no temptation of talking of, e.g., the male Homo sapiens as a subspecies of Homo sapiens, we do recognise subspecies for each of the morphs of Papilio dardanus.
While mimicry polymorphism falls outside the scope of the HPC regimentation to be developed and defended in what follows, this is just as it should. The relation of mimicry morphs to their species is entirely analogous to the relation of species to higher taxa, and it should be treated analogously: as depending on the partial overlap of homeostatic mechanisms among the different subspecies, rather than on one single homeostatic mechanism bringing about different morphs connected informationally.
The same point can be made, of course, about the homeostatic mechanism that is asexual reproduction.
I do not wish to commit myself to the claim—indeed, I do not believe—that Richard Boyd’s explicit, fully worked-out theory of homeostatic property clusters involves an explicit conception of co-occurrence as spatio-temporal contiguity. The fact that he is ready to count the good, knowledge, or feudalism as examples of HPC suggests that it does not. What I do claim is that his conception of HPC is underdeveloped in a crucial respect—that of the nature of co-occurrence—and that when he has tried to offer a explicit characterisation, it has leaned towards contiguity co-occurrence. His proposed solution to the problem of polymorphism—discussed above—is a case in point. I offer the regimentation of co-occurrence as informational connectedness presented in the sequel as that which Boyd should be taken as referring to.
Skyrms talks about the signal changing probabilities, but this should not be understood in any causal sense; the signal need not be, and often will not be, causally upstream from the state signalled.
It should be noted that whatever is explaining the fact that probabilities move the way they do—whatever explains the informational connections in place—might change from case to case. It is overwhelmingly likely that, in biology, such explanations will always be causal. But a theory of natural kinds in general needs to make room for the possibility that for some kinds (most notably, kinds in physics), informational connections be rock bottom (Ladyman et al. 2007) or depend on something else entirely. This is one reason why ICPCs are characterised in informational, not causal, terms. The possibility of using information theory in the study of kinds is another.
At least no reasons having to do with species polymorphism: the ICPC theory, though, is still an HPC theory, and still relies on the notion of similarity. While I, predictably, regard this to be an advantage of the view (which is designed to be as small a departure from common HPC wisdom as possible), other theorists will undoubtedly disagree. For example, the ICPC predictions regarding speciation will differ from those of, e.g., Population Structure Theory (Ereshefsky and Matthen 2005; Matthen 2009) in that the former allows for anagenesis, which is at least uncongenial to the latter. The merits and demerits of the ICPC theory in this and other respects are quite independent of the issue of polymorphism, and should be assessed independently.
Of course, once past the most coarse-grained level of description, bacteria are exquisitely complicated structures, and something like ICPCs must be used in their characterisation.
For a defence that some diseases are HPCs see Williams (2011).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Marc Ereshefsky, P.D. Magnus, Kim Sterelny and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Funding
Research for this paper was supported by the Spanish Government via research grants MCINN FFI2011-26853 and CSD2009-0056 (CONSOLIDER INGENIO).
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Martínez, M. Informationally-connected property clusters, and polymorphism. Biol Philos 30, 99–117 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9443-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9443-1