The Nature of Folk‐Botanical Life Forms

Abstract

Original work by Brent Berlin, Eugene Hunn, Cecil Brown, and other ethnoscientists has produced significant findings pertaining to claims of universality for folk‐biological ranks, in general, and folk‐botanical life forms, in particular. These findings implicitly call into question conventional wisdom in the history of biology, which tends to consider life forms as the outworn vestiges of scholastic tradition or as merely socially practical ways of carving up the living world. Unfortunately, however, ethnobiologists continue to rely on faulty analytical schema for assessing the nature of life forms which philosophers and historians of biology have developed in their ignorance of the popular conceptual foundations of folk taxonomy. The error is compounded by the adoption into ethnosystematics of the most empiricistically reductionist, and logically confused, interpretation of such schema that derives from the neo‐Adansonian, or pheneticist, school of modern system‐atics. This interpretation confounds (1) meaning and reference, (2) the semantics of cognitively distinct object domains, and (3) the conceptual differences between common sense and science. These points are challenged, and it is concluded that life forms, though anthropocentrically biased, are no more “artificial” or “special‐purpose” than higher‐order scientific taxa. Finally, the problem of so‐called “unaffiliated” and “ambiguous” generics is addressed and a new analysis offered.