Folkbiology

The term folkbiology refers to people’s everyday understanding of the biological world - how they perceive, categorize and reason about living things. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the work of researchers in anthropology, psychology, biology and philosophy of science. The issues covered include: are folk taxonomies a first-order approximation to classical scientific taxonomies, or are they driven more directly by utilitarian concerns?; how are these category schemes linked to reasoning about natural kinds?; is there any nontrivial sense in which folk-taxonomic structures are universal?; and what impact does science have on folk taxonomy?