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ABSTRACT
This paper details the content and structure of the folk concept of life, and discusses its relevance for scientific research on life. In four empirical studies, we investigate which features of life are considered salient, universal, central, and necessary. Functionings, such as nutrition and reproduction, but not material composition, turn out to be salient features commonly associated with living beings (Study 1). By contrast, being made of cells is considered a universal feature of living species (Study 2), a central aspect of life (Study 3), and our best candidate for being necessary for life (Study 4). These results are best explained by the hypothesis that people take life to be a natural kind subject to scientific scrutiny.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Having a seat is a central feature of a chair. Without a seat, you cannot sit on it, it is not comfortable, etc. But having a seat is not necessary for being a chair. Chairs can have their seats taken off and remain chairs.
2 Being male is a necessary feature of being a bachelor. But being male is not central. Being unmarried and young do not depend on being male.
3 Note that there is no settled and prescribed phrasing for collecting the semantic features of concepts.
4 For the complete dataset, criteria for categorization, and the actual categorization results, please go to the online repository at https://osf.io/rn679/?view_only=5ab6d7ca417a43a1bc6b037334ea27df
5 Our descriptions of those features that are functionings are vague. First, this is because it is open whether we mean things that living beings do often, do regularly, can do, or can do in certain parts of their lives. Second, it’s not entirely clear in what some functionings (e.g. taking up nutrition) actually consist. For our experiments, we decided not to clarify things further, so as to keep the text of the vignette easily comprehensible.
7 This is in accordance with observations by Kerbe [Citation2016]. In his study, participants classified as esoteric and participants from a Catholic University tended to characterise life by using different terms than did people from other groups.
8 When the exclusion criteria were not applied, the percentages of participants who responded with 100% was substantially smaller for certain features: organic material (49.2%), cells (51.6%), evolution (39.1%), reproduction (40.6%), growth (43.8%), nutrition (40.6%), complexity (21.9%), perception (16.4%), movement (7.8%), consciousness (4.7%).
9 The surprise paradigm has been shown to deliver reliable results on the centrality of features for a wide range of concepts [Ahn Citation1998].
10 The average results were not significantly different from those for all participants (i.e. when the exclusion criteria were not applied) for the features cells (5.20 for all participants), organic material (4.91), reproduction (4.42), nutrition (4.41), evolution (4.38), and growth (3.75), complexity (3.55), and perception (3.22), all ps > 0.05. The mean values among all participants for movement (3.07) and consciousness (2.95), however, were significantly higher and closer to the midpoint than for the selected participants.
12 We decided to ask a question that is set in our times. While such a restriction has the advantage that people do not take an ‘everything-is-possible-in-the-future’ approach, it might have constrained people’s imagination on what is, and what is not, possible.
13 When all participants were included in the analysis, the results were not significantly different (all ps > 0.05). Average results among all participants for the ‘found’ vignettes were as follows: cell (4.41), reproduction (4.98), nutrition (5.50). For the ‘produced’ vignettes the mean values were these: cell (3.91), reproduction (4.29), nutrition (4.78).
14 Our proposal does not provide an explanation of how, exactly, salient features are used to pick out the natural kind life, and we do not think that it is important to provide this explanation. The reason is that the features are not supposed to delineate the extension of the concept life; their role is, rather, to pick out, or point to, a natural kind.
15 Our proposal does not assume that some material building blocks exhaust the essence of life according to the folk understanding of life (see Dumsday [Citation2010] for the possibility of complex essences).
16 For the same reason, it’s not clear whether people are carbon chauvinists.
17 Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the University of Prague Departmental Colloquium and the European Experimental Philosophy Conference 2021. We would like to thank the audiences and in particular Georg Brun, Pascale Willemsen, and two anonymous referees for this journal for their very helpful feedback.