Abstraction in ecology: reductionism and holism as complementary heuristics

Raerinne, Jani

doi:10.1007/s13194-017-0191-3

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Ecologists have been intrigued since the beginning of the twentieth century by allometric and scaling relationships 9 between organismal features and ecological phenomena (Brown et al, 2004;O'Connor et al, 2007;Raerinne, 2013Raerinne, , 2017. However, there was no widely accepted mechanism for the explanation of these patterns until recently.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Metabolic Theory of Ecology as a Mechanistic Approach

Martins

2023

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

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Philosophy of science has recently given a great deal of attention to the concept of mechanism. However, unlike the biological mechanisms identified in other fields of the life sciences, ecological mechanisms have not been exhaustively examined. The aim of this chapter is to critically analyze the Metabolic Theory of Ecology. This theory is supposed to provide a unification of population, community and ecosystem approaches rooted in the ecophysiology of individual organisms. In this context, metabolism plays a fundamental role as the unifying concept between levels. According to its authors, this is a mechanistic approach to ecology involving decomposability into parts that structure the different levels of ecological organization and into mechanisms that can be characterized by identifying a phenomenon, parts, causing, and organization. I shall first argue that its mechanistic nature needs clarification. I shall then suggest that the theory can explain some phenomena at various levels of ecological organization and can describe some patterns or tendencies in nature, although it is not able to completely elucidate their mechanistic basis, i.e., to explain the mechanisms that produce these patterns.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Metabolic Theory of Ecology as a Mechanistic Approach

Martins

2023

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

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Vertical-horizontal distinction in resolving the abstraction, hierarchy, and generality problems of the mechanistic account of physical computation

Kuokkanen

2022

Synthese

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Descriptive abstraction means omission of information from descriptions of phenomena. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between vertical and horizontal descriptive abstraction. Vertical abstracts away levels of mechanism or organization, while horizontal abstracts away details within one level of organization. The distinction is implicit in parts of the literature, but it has received insufficient attention and gone mainly unnoticed. I suggest that the distinction can be used to clarify how computational descriptions are formed in some variants of the mechanistic account of physical computation. Furthermore, I suggest that, if this suggestion is adopted, it can be used to resolve what I call abstraction, hierarchy, and generality problems raised against mechanistic account of physical computation. According to the abstraction problem, the mechanistic account of physical computation is conceptually confused in claiming that physical systems process computational, abstract properties. An existing solution distinguishes between descriptive and metaphysical abstraction, suggesting that the abstraction problem unnecessarily postulates metaphysically abstract entities. The solution has been criticized for leading to what I call hierarchy and generality problems: it results in two separate hierarchies, one physical and one computational, making it problematic both to account for the generality of computational descriptions and to specify how the two hierarchies are related to each other. Adopting the vertical-horizontal distinction and the view that computational descriptions are achieved by horizontal abstraction allows one to account for the generality of computational descriptions, and to form a single hierarchy in which there are no separate hierarchies in need of integration.

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The Future of Predictive Ecology

Elliott-Graves¹

2019

Philosophical Topics

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Prediction is an important aspect of scientific practice, because it helps us to confirm theories and effectively intervene on the systems we are investigating. In ecology, prediction is a controversial topic: even though the number of papers focusing on prediction is constantly increasing, many ecologists believe that the quality of ecological predictions is unacceptably low, in the sense that they are not sufficiently accurate sufficiently often. Moreover, ecologists disagree on how predictions can be improved. On one side are the ‘theory-driven’ ecologists, those who believe that ecology lacks a sufficiently strong theoretical framework. For them, more general theories will yield more accurate predictions. On the other are the ‘applied’ ecologists, whose research is focused on effective interventions on ecological systems. For them, deeper knowledge of the system in question is more important than background theory. The aim of this paper is to provide a philosophical examination of both sides of the debate: as there are strengths and weaknesses in both approaches to prediction, a pluralistic approach is best for the future of predictive ecology.

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Abstraction in ecology: reductionism and holism as complementary heuristics

Cited by 3 publications

References 55 publications

The Metabolic Theory of Ecology as a Mechanistic Approach

The Metabolic Theory of Ecology as a Mechanistic Approach

Vertical-horizontal distinction in resolving the abstraction, hierarchy, and generality problems of the mechanistic account of physical computation

The Future of Predictive Ecology

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