On the very idea of biological individuality

Abstract

The burgeoning debate over biological individuality raises deep issues, philosophical and scientific, but suffers from pervasive conceptual unclarity. This paper offers a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. It is argued that the problem of biological individuality, as it is often formulated in the literature, rests on a category mistake. The mistake is to think that the expression “biological individual” is a sortal , when in fact it is not. This diagnosis sheds light on a number of otherwise puzzling aspects of the debate.