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Controversies and Interdisciplinarity: Beyond disciplinary fragmentation for a new knowledge model
Edited by Jens Allwood, Olga Pombo, Clara Renna and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 16] 2020
► pp. 115–131

Chapter 6
What is the meaning of biodiversity?

A pragmatist approach to an intrinsically interdisciplinary concept

| University of Pisa
| University of Pisa

The preservation of biodiversity is one of the greatest concerns of our age. However, a satisfactory operational definition of biodiversity is still lacking, and it is likely that it won’t be achieved in the near future. In their practice of measurement scientists adopt a pluralistic and multi-dimensional metric – an approach which is widely accepted, but not theoretically justified. The goal of this paper is to account for such pluralistic approach. Our solution is pragmatist: we hold that the pragmatic maxim highlights the fact-value entanglement intrinsic to the concept of biodiversity. On this basis, we argue that the axiological dimension is essential to the meaning of the concept since its extension cannot be fixed independently of it.

Keywords: biodiversity, fact-value entanglement, measurement, pluralism, pragmatic maxim, pragmatism
Article outline
  • 1.The traditional approach to biodiversity
  • 2.Pragmatist epistemology and the rejection of the copy theory of knowledge
  • 3.How to make biodiversity clear: Pragmatic maxim and the meaning of scientific concepts
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.16.06ban
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