Pluralism and Realism Revisited

Abstract

We saw in §3.5 that biologists have proposed many different conceptions of species. Generally speaking, these conceptions are answers to the species category question: What makes some group of organisms a group at the species rank?¹ This diversity of answers is problematic for several reasons. One problem has a purely practical character. If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves talking past one another when talking about species. That difficulty can be addressed, of course, by simply taking care to say precisely what we mean by ‘species’.