The history and philosophy of taxonomy as an information science
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The history and philosophy of taxonomy as an information science Catherine Kendig1 · Joeri Witteveen2
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
1 Taxonomy in the information age We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. Natural history and its descendant discipline of biological taxonomy are prime examples of sciences dedicated to creating and managing systems of ordering data. In some sense, the idea of biological taxonomy as an information science is commonplace. Perhaps it is because of its self-evidence that the information science perspective on taxonomy has not been a major theme in the history and philosophy of science. The botanist Vernon Heywood once pointed out that historians of biology, in their ‘preoccupation with the development of the sciences of botany and zoology … [have] diverted attention from the role of taxonomy as an information science’ (Heywood 1985: 11). More specifically, he argued that historians had failed Catherine Kendig and Joeri Witteveen have contributed equally to this paper and are listed in alphabetical order. * Catherine Kendig [email protected] Joeri Witteveen [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 368 Farm Lane, 503 South Kedzie Hall, East Lansing Michigan, USA
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Department of Science Education, Section for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Copenhagen, Rådmansgade 64, Copenhagen, Denmark
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to appreciate how principles and practices that can be traced to Linnaeus constituted ‘a change in the nature of taxonomy from a local or limited folk communication system and later a codified folk taxonomy to a formal system of information science [that] marked a watershed in the history of biology’ (ibid.). A similar observation could be made about twentieth-century philosophy of biology, which mostly skipped over practical and epistemic questions about information management in taxonomy. The taxonomic themes that featured in the emerging philosophy of biology literature in the second half of the twentieth century were predominantly metaphysical in orientation. This is illustrated by what has become known as the ‘essentialism story’: an account about the essentialist nature of preDarwinian taxonomy that used to be accepted by many historians and philosophers, and which stimulated efforts to document and interpret shifts in the metaphysical understanding of species and (natural) classification (Richards 2010; Winsor 2003; Wilkins 2009). Although contemporary debates in the philosophy of taxonomy have moved on, much discussion
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