On the supposed essentialism before Darwin

There is an extensive literature on essentialism in the natural sciences, including recent work by Brian Ellis, Joseph Laporte and others arguing that it is time to reintroduce the notion of essentialism. This follows the raising of essentialism in the philosophy of language by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Just recently, in an essay in Philosophy of Science (whose bastard editors will not even acknowledge that they have received my submissions after 12 months, ahem), Michael Devitt published a paper in which he wants to establish what he calls “intrinsic biological essentialism”.

I will have more to say about this in a little while, but for now I merely want to note that it is in fact false to think that essentialism was something that existed before evolution, as if it was the “archaic, default” view that the modern view replaces. I had, for example, long thought that essentialism was something touted by William Whewell in the 1830s, and I had the impression that Whewell had been the inventor of essentialism (see Snyder and Hull’s works cited at the end of this post). It turns out that yet another essentialist phantom has evaporated. Below the fold I give a passage by Whewell, which goes once more to support the views I and others like Polly Winsor have that there never was an essentialism in natural history.

It should be noted that “essentialism” is a coat of many colours. What Ellis and those working in physics seem to mean by it is a set of necessary properties that are ontologically fundamental. In physics, this may work; I have no idea. In natural history, it never has. What most critics of “essentialism” mean in natural history is something like “A kind has necessary and sufficient properties”, which is germane to Whewell’s discussion. As to Devitt’s view, I think there is a perfectly benign way to interpret essentialism in a biological context which makes what he says both true and uncontroversial when stripped of trigger words like “essence”. More on that later…

Whewell, William. Novum Organon Renovatum: Being the Second Part of the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 3^rd ed. London: J. W. Parker and son, 1858, p175f.

13 It has already been shown that even geometry is not founded upon definitions alone: and we shall not here again analyse the fallacy of this belief in the supreme value of definitions. But we may remark that the study of Natural History appears to be the proper remedy for this erroneous habit of thought. For in every department of Natural History the object of our study is kinds of things not one of which kinds can be rigorously defined, yet all of them are sufficiently definite. In these cases we may indeed give a specific description of one of the kinds, and may call it a definition; but it is clear that such a definition does not contain the essence of the thing. We say⁵ that the Rose Tribe are ‘Polypetalous dicotyledons with lateral styles, superior simple ovaria, regular perigynous stamens, exalbuminous definite seeds, and alternate stipulate leaves.’ But no one would say that this was our essential conception of a rose, to be substituted for it in all cases of doubt or obscurity, by way of making our reasonings perfectly clear. Not only so; but as we have already seen⁶, the definition does not even apply to all the tribe. For the stipulae are absent in Lowea: the albumen is present in Neillia: the fruit of Spiraea sorbifolia is capsular. If, then, we can possess any certain knowledge in Natural History, (which no cultivator of the subject will doubt,) it is evident that our knowledge cannot depend on the possibility of laying down exact definitions and reasoning from them.

14. But it may be asked, if we cannot define a word, or a class of things which a word denotes, how can we distinguish what it does mean from what it does not mean? How can we say that it signifies one thing rather than another, except we declare what is its signification? The answer to this question involves the general principle of a natural method of classification which has already been stated⁷ and need not here be again dwelt on. It has been shown that names of kinds of things (genera) associate them according to total resemblances, not partial characters. The principle which connects a group of objects in natural history is not a definition but a type. Thus we take as the type of the Rose family, it may be the common wild rose; all species which resemble this flower more than they resemble any other group of species are also roses, and form one genus. All genera which resemble Roses more than they resemble any other group of genera are of the same family. And thus the Rose family is collected about some one species which is the type or central point of the group.

In such an arrangement, it may readily be conceived that though the nucleus of each group may cohere firmly together, the outskirts of contiguous groups may approach, and may even be intermingled, so that some species may doubtfully adhere to one group or another. Yet this uncertainty does not at all affect the truths which we find ourselves enabled to assert with regard to the general mass of each group. And thus we are taught that there may be very important differences between two groups of objects, although we are unable to tell where the one group ends and where the other begins; and that there may be propositions of indisputable truth, in which it is impossible to give unexceptionable definitions of the terms employed.

5 Lindley’s Nat Syst Bot p 8
6 Hist Sc Ideas b viii c ii sect 3
7 Hist Sc Ideas b viii c ii sect 3

Novum Organon Renovatum By William Whewell

References

Devitt, Michael. “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism.” Philosophy of Science 75, no. 3 (2008): 344–82.

Ellis, Brian. Scientific Essentialism, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

———. The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism. Chesham: Acumen, 2002.

Hull, David L. The Metaphysics of Evolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

LaPorte, Joseph. Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Snyder, Laura J. “Consilience, Confirmation, and Realism.” In Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories and Applications, edited by Peter Achinstein, 129-49. Baltimore and London: JHU Press, 2005.

———. Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.