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Hello, The following event may be of interest to you: Are Birds Dinosaurs? Friday, February 28, 2020 In a classic paper, the philosopher of biology John Dupré argued that the reclassification of whales in the 19th century, from fishes to mammals, was not so much a correction of a scientific error as it was a reshuffling of largely arbitrary folk categories, since until the 19th century there was nothing in nature preventing the class of fish from including warm-blooded, milk-producing, live-birth-giving animals. More recently we have been encouraged, or perhaps pressured, to correct our previous “error” of believing that the dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. They are still among us, we are told, chirping and flying about. Yet whatever phylogenetic discoveries reveal, so far the folk category of “dinosaur” has resisted most efforts to stretch it far enough to include, e.g., sparrows. That is not what a dinosaur looks like, the person in the street will reliably insist. Unlike the case of whales and fish, no one has ever seen an actual dinosaur, and a priori we might expect the folk category that contains them to be more, not less, flexible than the one from which whales were lately expelled. What can this example show us about the relationship between scientific taxonomy and the semantics of natural-kind terms? Is there any sense at all in saying that birds are really dinosaurs in spite of the way we talk about them? In this talk—in which I range broadly to explore a number of basic conceptual problems of the philosophy of taxonomy—I willl argue that there is not. Time: 4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5 Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102 Sponsor: Philosophy Program; The Thinking Animals Initiative Contact: Jay Elliott. E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 845-758-7280 If you would like to see more events please visit the following URL: http://www.bard.edu/academics/programs/physics/events/