Ecology as Historical Science

Publisher Summary This chapter explores the place of ecology among the sciences, emphasizing methodological and epistemic features that group ecology among the historical sciences. Many basic ecological processes and interactions, from reproduction and growth to parasitism, predation, the food chain, and the contribution of photosynthetic plants to the earth's atmosphere, are firmly established on the basis of common sense observations, as well as results from chemistry and other sciences. The epistemic status of ecological models is not, in general, simply grounded in predictive success; many of their features are instead a matter of common sense reflection on the processes involved in, for example, populating a newly formed island; the difficulty, of course, lies in combining them into a model that usefully captures some features of what is, in every particular case, a very complex story. Reduction relations and emergence are also examined, with an eye to relations between the sciences. While metaphysical forms of reductionism, involving ontological mappings from the entities of a reduced theory to collections of entities in a reducing theory, are relatively simple, more substantive reductions, which would require also capturing the observational and inferential uses of the reduced theory within the reducing theory, are clearly beyond to carry out. In this practical sense, different sciences may be integrated by inferential links, but they cannot be converted into a single science with a general and unified theoretical structure.