So, in the last episode, you'll recall that the dastardly villain "theory" has relinquished its grip on species in a cliffhanger. But that raises a few questions. What, for instance, is it to be a theoretical object?
Traditionally, something was a theoretical object, that is, an object that was only theoretical, if it was something that the theory required or employed but which was not empirically ascertainable. Examples were "electron" c1920, "gene" prior to 1952, and perhaps still "Higgs boson" for reasons that I do not understand. But this is a positivist sense of theory - a formal system in which objects are either verifiable or not. Whether or not one is now a logical empiricist instead of a logical positivist, objects are much more nuanced than that.
There have been several proposals for what makes an object "theoretical". To begin with, calling an object theoretical is not to cast doubt upon its reality. That is the old conflation of vernacular uses of the word "theory" (and possibly also cultural uses) with the scientific sense. To avoid that confusion let me reiterate that to call something a "theory" in science is to give it the highest possible status as a concept or explanation.
But within philosophy, there seem to be a few major views. So far as I have encountered them, let me list and explicate them. The first is that of Quine. Something exists just to the extent that our best theory of a given domain requires them. The slogan is "to be is to be the value of a bound variable" in some formal model. On this view, species are simply not theoretical, and indeed do not exist, because if I am right that no theory of biology requires species, then they are never the value of a bound variable in any model of biology.
There is another, similar but not so restrictive view: that of "Ramseyfication". On this account, what a theory requires is based on a formalisation - a "Ramsey sentence" [also called a "Carnap-Ramsey sentence" or a "Ramsey-Lewis sentence"; see this paper] - of the theory. Objects exist so long as they are represented either by primitive terms (variables or constants) of the theory or combinations or derivations of those. A primitive here might be something empirical, so that species might be primitives of biological theory, but are not themselves explained by it. I think this is not the case with species, because in every case of which I am aware, one can replace the species X y used with something like "a local population of X y" or "organisms that behave in such a way, which is typical of X y". In other words the species X y is replaceable with objects that the theory actually employs. Hence the Ramsey approach, sometimes also called the "Canberra Plan", treats these objects as non-objects. Sometimes this is played out as "Structural Realism" in which a theory as a structure is true, but the objects it poses that are "unobservable" may or may not be real, so long as the theory is empirically adequate in other ways. This is irrelevant here.
So, my question is this: what makes an object theoretical and are there other roles objects and their representation play in science? For my view to work, it must be that there are objects that are described by the theory, which in the domain of that theory have a certain coherence or unity as objects. Mechanisms, like geology's tectonic drift, are obviously theoretical in that sense. But mountains are more difficult. Mountains are real things, but the category as a whole lacks theoretical coherence. That is, a mountain has no theoretical place qua "mountain", but as a particular mountain, say, Mount St Helens or the Matterhorn, it calls for explanation. So I call these phenomenal objects. Like sand dunes they are real things - if you have to map them, travel around them, or climb over them, they are as real as anything can be, but the choice of demarcation between peaks can be conventional or even just something that perception hands to us on a plate. Nothing in theory demands that this particular mountain exists, nor even that there are mountains. On a planet with no tectonics, after a reasonable period, there would be no mountains.
Species are like that, I believe. They are phenomenal objects, real facts about the world, which we perceive rather than define. Of course, this makes them relative in a way to the rules and capacities of perception. If we have poor vision, we might not "perceive" mountains until we had telescopic surveyor's sights. Once we have that technology, though (which, note, doesn't rely upon the theories of geology) we do see mountains. Similarly, we may need to use all kinds of assay techniques to see species, but when we have them they are seen.
An example I much like to use is the discovery by Murray Littlejohn of the different species that had previously been called Rana pipiens, the "leopard frog" of the southern United States. A widespread species, Littlejohn was using a new piece of equipment designed for speech therapy - the sonograph - to graph the mating calls of these frogs. He discovered that there were a number - up to six - distinct mating calls. Since mating calls in amphibians are highly species-particular, Littlejohn proposed that this was in fact a species complex, in which morphology and ecology were indistinguishable, but that mating was restricted within the mating call groups, and these were species. Subsequent work proved this to be the case. The differentiation was always there, but you needed the right assay technique.
This is not species being "constructed" or any other postmodern nonsense. Yes, the concept we have of those species is being constructed (and reconstructed as new evidence comes in), but the concept refers to, or denotes, realities. And those realities are either of classes of things that are theoretical, such as populations, haplotypes, genes, developmental sequences or cycles, and so on, or of things that are not required by the theory. And such are species. When we construct a concept, we are learning about the things we describe. It's like finding that Everest has a hidden peak that is even higher. Our concept of Everest changes, but the thing itself was already as it is.
The implication here is that theories are not all that is going on in science. Objects in a domain exist prior to the demarcation of the domain, or are not objects we infer from the theory. This is part of a wider claim I want one day to make about science - traditional philosophy of science (and by implication of language) has ignored three quarters of what is going on in science. Classification and passive observation still occur.
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Your discussion of mountains makes me wonder if you're looked at Tye's ideas about vague objects. He idea (as far as I mis-understand it) is that one can define objects by their constituent parts, and for vague objects, it is clear that some parts are in that object (e.g. the peak of Mt. Everest is part of Mt. Everest), but there are also parts where it is not so clear (e.g. the foothills). These are, in this sense, vague. Species could be viewed in the same way (someone argued this for populations).
Of course, words like "ontic" start getting thrown around pretty quickly, which is usually a sign that it's time to head for the door.
I think that vagueness itself is a side issue, although of course the sorites is an issue with species. But there's something about it that is roughly relevant. I think that if we stop trying to define things with clear boundaries, and simply use exemplars or central points as our explicanda, then we can classify without theoretical prior knowledge. And in fact this is exactly how classification in biology and other sciences was done in the past.
I think that if we stop trying to define things with clear boundaries, and simply use exemplars or central points as our explicanda, then we can classify without theoretical prior knowledge.
Doesn't that strongly suggest that the "theory" of which species are an object, is one embedded in the human mind? Like pornography, I know it when I see it!
Your "phenomenal objects" like species relate to "real" objects out there (populations, etc), because the human mind was evolved to recognize to some significant extent biological realities. But since the embedded theory in the human mind isn't a full logical theory that passes tests for self-consistency, but an ad-hoc theory that only needs to be sufficient for practical human needs, the objects of perception such as species or mountain are not going to be in general a part of any self-consistent theory, but simply starting points ("observations") for building self-consistent theories and "real" objects.
These kind of objects would then be partially "hard-wired" and partially "cultural", and they would really reflect to some extent objective reality, but they would rarely be isometric to objective reality, since no one's functional "world theory" is every an actual mathematical theory, but at best is a practical, computationally inexpensive heuristic that sufficiently matches real theory to solve practical problems.
Are you saying the typological thinkers have been right all along? Also, I used to have a book, "Consider a spherical cow". Is a spherical cow a theoretical object?
This is really a dispute over which comes first, the theory or the data. Not a philosopher, I'm probably misrepresenting them in my belief that philosophical discussions mostly fail to recognize the existence of data at all, except to dismiss it as "inductivism" or the like. But the situation with rana pipiens isn't unique to biology. No theory of cosmology predicts the fact that the Milky Way Galaxy has two major irregular galaxies associated with it. They can predict that it's not impossible for such a cluster to exist, but cosmology is as vulnerable to what Stephen Jay Gould called "contingencies" as is any observational dataset from biology or any other science. That is, theories predict the results of data analyses, but they don't predict the data itself.
Where philosophers really fail to come to grips with how scientists actually deal with scientific theories is to address the fact that scientific theories themselves are the result of the activity of something that should itself be a theoretical object, namely the human brain. Somehow they need to incorporate the insights of Godel, Turing, and Emil Post concerning universal computability into the structure of theories about the creation of scientific theories. But I haven't seen it done yet.