Article ID: CBB712097202

Ecological Laws for Agroecological Design: The Need for More Organized Collaboration in Producing, Evaluating and Updating Ecological Generalizations (2020)

unapi

The applied discipline of agroecological design provides a useful case study for examining broader philosophical questions about the existence and importance of ecological generalizations or “laws.” Recent developments in the availability and use of formal meta-analyses have led to the discovery of many resilient generalizations in ecology (Linquist et al. 2016). However, these “laws” face numerous challenges when it comes to their practical application. Concerns about their reliability and scope might stem from unclear logical and epistemic connections to more foundational or “unifying” generalizations (Lean in Philos Top 47(1), 2019) which, in ecology, tend to be derived from first principles and in association with highly abstract models. This raises questions about the nature of those foundational generalizations themselves. In particular, how resilient are they compared to the generalizations uncovered by empirically driven methods? Here we propose a procedure for evaluating the resilience of generalizations across five ecologically relevant dimensions. This procedure was applied to seven well known foundational generalizations in ecology. Surprisingly, it turned out to be impossible to estimate the resilience of these foundational generalizations based on the available literature. This points to the need for a more centralized repository of information about ecological generalizations, created with the explicit aim of evaluating such important dimensions as causal mechanism and predictive power.

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Authors & Contributors
Shaw, Jamie
Kent H. Redford
Boem, Federico
Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira
Michael O'Keeffe
Bronson, Kelly
Concepts
Philosophy of science
Ecology
Epistemology
Agriculture
Natural laws
Metaphysics
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
Early modern
Renaissance
20th century
Places
United States
South America
Mexico
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