Wallace Ken J, Jago Mark
UWA School of Agriculture and Environment, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia.
Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Humanities Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
J Environ Manage. 2017 Sep 1;199:13-20. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.05.029. Epub 2017 May 16.
How entities, the things that exist, are defined and categorised affects all aspects of environmental management including technical descriptions, quantitative analyses, participatory processes, planning, and decisions. Consequently, ambiguous definitions and wrongly assigning entities to categories, referred to as category mistakes, are barriers to effective management. Confusion caused by treating the term 'biodiversity' variously as the property of an area, the biota of an area, and a preferred end state (a value) - quite different categories of entities - is one example. To overcome such difficulties, we develop and define four entity categories - elements, processes, properties, and values - and two derived categories - states and systems. We argue that adoption of these categories and definitions will significantly improve environmental communication and analysis, and thus strengthen planning and decision-making.
实体，即存在的事物，其定义和分类方式会影响环境管理的各个方面，包括技术描述、定量分析、参与过程、规划和决策。因此，定义模糊以及将实体错误归类（即范畴错误）是有效管理的障碍。将“生物多样性”一词分别视为一个区域的属性、一个区域的生物群以及一种理想的最终状态（一种价值）——这些属于截然不同的实体类别——所造成的混淆就是一个例子。为克服此类困难，我们制定并定义了四个实体类别——要素、过程、属性和价值——以及两个派生类别——状态和系统。我们认为，采用这些类别和定义将显著改善环境交流与分析，进而加强规划与决策。
