Print PageHow one defines the term ‘ecosystem’ is clearly of central importance in arriving at good policy decisions regarding ecosystem management. If the definition is unrealistic, then policy decisions dictating the preservation of ecosystems will be unrealistic as well (a claim made, for example, by the ecosystem policy analyst, Allan Fitzsimmons, in 1999). Clearly what is needed are some guidelines on how to adequately introduce the term ‘ecosystem’ in scientific and policy discourse, and my goal in this presentation is to outline the philosophical dimensions of this task from the perspective of the noted philosopher of science, Rudolf Carnap. Carnap advocates a ‘tolerant’ attitude concerning scientific term introduction, but there is some controversy about what he means by being ‘tolerant’. I outline two interpretations of how to be tolerant in introducing a scientific term, and then apply these interpretations to the case of introducing the term ‘ecosystem’. To this end, I briefly recount the history of the ecosystem concept (guided in part by Frank Golley’s 1993 book), with the ultimate task of assessing which interpretation of Carnapian ‘tolerance’ gives the best result in interpreting this history, and in usefully motivating ecosystem research.
Results/Conclusions
The two interpretations of Carnapian tolerance on scientific term introduction at issue are called the ‘conditional’ and ‘absolute’ interpretations of tolerance. With these interpretations in mind, we reconstruct the development of the ecosystem concept, starting from notions of a biotic community proposed in the mid-19th century, working up until Arthur Tansley’s initial definition of an ‘ecosystem’ in 1935, and concluding roughly with Odum’s present-day authoritative definition. Reflection on this developmental history of the ecosystem concept reveals the largely empirical nature of how ecosystems are defined, but also reveals a number of obstacles in arriving with ‘ecosystem’ at an adequate definition (notably, it becomes difficult to determine where one ecosystem ends and the next begins). These empirical challenges lead some ecologists to resort to pragmatic approaches in defining ecosystems. What I show is that this presumed reliance on pragmatics has various negative implications for ecosystem science if one interprets the introduction of the term ‘ecosystem’ as motivated by an absolutist approach to Carnapian tolerance. Notably, so motivated, we are driven to an anti-realism about ecosystems, in that it becomes problematic to say that ecosystems are real. Conversely, if one interprets Carnapian tolerance conditionally, one has improved resources to avoid an anti-realism.
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