From: Thom Quinn (swo@execpc.com)
Date: Sat Jan 16 1999 - 10:47:00 MST
Actually, there are several specialized philosophy journals, such as The
Philosophy of Biology, that have had quite a number of "species papers" for
the past 25 years. The big issue has been if species can be considered a
"class" or an "individual" concept.
Science has a metaphysics too! Philosophers and Scientists need to keep each
other in check sometimes.
Thom Quinn
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Max More, Ph.D. max@maxmore.com wrote:
>
> > I recently completed a draft of a paper that I'm going to send to
> > philosophy journals. I want to get it off ASAP, but I'd appreciate
> > feedback before doing so.
>
> I'm not sure why you would submit suggestions for new species
> classifications to philosophy journals. I realize that your expertise
> is in philosophy, but if this is a serious suggestion for the extension
> to the biological nomenclature, you need to send it for peer-review to
> those who develop and confirm said nomenclature. Unless the philosophy
> journals you are considering are specifically intended to address the
> philosophy of biological nomenclature, I would suggest that your
> submission might be misdirected.
>
> If it has not been reviewed by a biologist, and if you do not have
> specific training in biological nomenclature, you could easily be
> including very basic mistakes in your paper that would mar its serious
> consideration. Just as an example, are you aware that biologists curse
> the term "homosexual" as being unscientific? It uses the Latin root
> instead of the Greek prefix as do the terms "asexual," "bisexual,"
> "heterosexual," "polysexual," and the like. Whoever invented this term
> did not know the proper biological conventions. If you are not trained
> in biological nomenclature, you could be making similar mistakes.
>
> As with any international standards, there are committees and
> international agreements within the scientific community as to which
> standards are acceptable and which are being developed. If you publish
> your suggestions outside the system, this could also mar its serious
> reception. Imagine if someone published a suggested change to
> astronomical nomenclature on their own, or to mathematical notation on
> their own. It would not only be ignored, but would probably be directly
> denounced by the standards bodies as being apocryphal and unapproved.
> They may even pass a standard against its use. The committee that
> developed HTML was so angered by Netscape and Microsoft publishing "HTML
> 3 compliant" browsers before the standard approval and with unofficial
> and conflicting extensions, that they skipped version 3 and proclaimed
> that any product claiming "HTML 3" was fraudulent.
>
> I don't mean to sound negative here, but I just wanted to warn you about
> some of the pitfalls you might encounter in proposing scientific
> nomenclature if you are not aware of the proper procedures to do this.
> --
> Harvey Newstrom <newstrom@newstaffinc.com> <http://newstaffinc.com>
> Author, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Consultant, Researcher, Scientist.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:02:51 MST