Shavit Ayelet, Griesemer James R
Departments of Interdisciplinary Studies and of Environmental Sciences, Tel Hai College, 12210, Upper Galilee, Israel.
Department of Philosophy, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
J Hist Biol. 2018 Jun;51(2):283-318. doi: 10.1007/s10739-017-9489-4.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to some familiar philosophical distinctions such as fact versus value, emotion versus reason and basic versus applied science. According to Grinnell, unlike sentiment-based generalizations, a fact-based generalization traces its diverse commitments and thus becomes tractable for its audience. We argue that foregrounding tractability better explains Grinnell's practice in the context of his time as well as in the context of current discourse among scientists over the political "biases" of biodiversity research and its problem of "reproducibility."
在二十世纪初，生物学家约瑟夫·格林内尔对科学与情感作出了区分，这涉及到如何基于事实进行概括以保护生物多样性。我们受到格林内尔式科学的启发，它在研究和保护生物多样性方面成功产生了长达一个世纪的影响，这种影响与一些常见的哲学区分，如事实与价值、情感与理性以及基础科学与应用科学相互交织。根据格林内尔的观点，与基于情感的概括不同，基于事实的概括追溯其多样的承诺，从而使其受众易于理解。我们认为，突出可处理性能更好地解释格林内尔在其所处时代背景下的实践，以及在当前科学家关于生物多样性研究的政治“偏见”及其“可重复性”问题的讨论背景下的实践。
