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Abstract Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This article reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subjugated forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a focus on demarcation obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. 

Abstract What role does the concept of naturalness play in the development of scientific knowledge and understanding? Whether naturalness is taken to be an ontological dimension of the world or a cognitive dimension of our human perspective within it, assumptions of naturalness seem to frame both concepts and practices that inform the partitioning of parts and the kinding of kinds. Within the natural sciences, knowledge of what something is as well as how it is studied rely on conceptual commitments. These conceptual commitments shape how entities and processes are categorizedasnatural depending on how naturalness has been understood within that discipline. In this paper, I explore how commitments to naturalness shape different conceptualizations of what were previously and what are now considered to be fundamental parts in plant morphology. Relying on an historically informed epistemological approach, I trace the origins and development of models of plant morphology from (1) Goethe’s classical LEAF-ROOT-STEM archetype model; (2) Agnes Arber’s revisions to Goethe’s model reconceived in her partial-shoot theory of the leaf; and (3) Rolf Sattler’s proposal for a processual model of plant morphology. These influential models posit ontologically and epistemologically inconsistent conceptualizations of the natural fundamental parts of plants and how they are related to each other. To explain what this inconsistency means for the concept of naturalness and the role it plays in plant morphology, I suggest naturalness might best be conceived of as a contextually bound classificatory concept that is made and remade through its operationalized use within a model, theory, set of practices, or discipline. 

Abstract There are now dozens of proposals for integrating ethics into the early planning and assessment of technological innovation. This paper tracks some of Larry Hickman’s contributions to these trends. While Hickman’s suggestions could be incorporated into virtually many of the new proposals for integrating ethics into technological research, development and dissemination, barriers remain. In this paper, I will explores some reasons why the field remains fragmented, emphasizing weaknesses in the pragmatist approach. First, I acknowledge the significance of obvious explanations: the technical community’s unfamiliarity with ethical inquiry and the lack of both administrative and financial commitment to ethics-oriented research. There is, in short, an epistemic gap between the message that innovators are prepared to hear and the sophisticated response that Hickman’s pragmatism offers. This gap may be a practical limitation to philosophical pragmatism in many of its manifestations. 

Double session: How does dirt become soil? Categorizations of soil in the agricultural sciences. Organized and chaired by Catherine Kendig with presenters Roberta Millstein, Denise Hossom, Robert Meunier, Aja Watkins, and Özlem Yilmaz Silverman. Biennial meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal. 

Part of the 90-minute paper panel “Epistemic and ethical functions of categorizing and tool use in the agricultural sciences”. Organized by Catherine Kendig. Food Cultures and Social Justice, the 2025 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society/Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (ASFS/AFHVS). Corvallis, Oregon State University. 

Part of the 90-minute paper panel “Epistemic and ethical functions of categorizing and tool use in the agricultural sciences”. Organized by Catherine Kendig with Özlem Yilmaz Silverman and Paul Thompson. Food Cultures and Social Justice, the 2025 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society/Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (ASFS/AFHVS). Corvallis, Oregon State University. 

While plants provide some of the most interesting cases for individuality-related problems in philosophy of biology (e.g., Clarke 2012; Gerber 2018), no work has examined plant individuality through specifically focusing on physiological processes, a lacuna this paper aims to fill. We think that different domains of biology suggest different approaches, and our specific focus on physiological processes, such as plant hormone systems and source-sink balance regulations, will help to identify coordinated systems at different scales. Identifying physiological individuals is crucial for a wide range of research in plant biology, including research on plant nutrition, transport and accumulation of nutrients in edible parts, and plant responses to various stress conditions such as plant diseases and changing abiotic conditions. Although plants do produce systemic responses to local stimuli (e.g., a sudden wound on one leaf can result in a whole-plant response), considering them as individuals is (often) problematic. They are highly modular organisms, and they can grow vegetatively, constituting clones of what seem, superficially, to be individual organisms. Moreover, as with animals, there are problems raised by their symbiotic relations to micro-organisms, most notably the mycorrhiza, through which they may be connected to other plants. We argue that coordinated plant systems can be distinguished at multiple scales from a physiological perspective. While none of these is a unit that must be necessarily called “the individual,” they offer integrated approaches for various research problems in plant science. 

Facing stress and producing stress responses are crucial aspects of an organism’s life and the evolution of both its species and of the other species in its environment, which are co-evolving with it. Philosophers and biologists emphasize the importance of environmental complexity and how organisms deal with it in evolution of cognitive processes. This article adds to these discussions by highlighting the importance of stress physiology in processes connected to plant cognition. While this article supports the thesis that life means cognizing (i.e., sensing the environment, arranging internal processes according to that perception, and affecting the environment with its actions), it also emphasizes that there are various kinds of organisms. In this regard, plant cognition is not animal cognition. However, given both the variety and continuity in evolutionary processes and the similarities even between the distantly related organisms in the tree of life, I argue that it is usually useful to consider and compare physiological and molecular mechanisms in plants and animals as well as the concepts and research processes in animal and plant science. Although the “pathological complexity” thesis that Veit (2023) presents is fruitful in considering the evolution of consciousness and cognition, I argue that, when thinking of biological processes in relation to cognition, stress can be a helpful concept (maybe even as suitable as pathological complexity) in thinking of organisms’ responses to environmental complexity and their adaptation and acclimation processes. 

10th Integrated History and Philosophy of Science Conference. California Institute of Technology. Pasadena, California.