A challenge to the "measurement" camp

A proponent of scientific perspectivism would say that because scientists put together models and theories of a phenomenon for specific purposes, and because none of those models or theories can capture all of the details of the phenomenon at once, each one is necessarily partial. A pluralist philosopher of science would say we should use all these perspectives to put together theories about the biological world that are patchwork in a way, but all the better for it.

This sounds a lot like the case of the microbiome—but these views are much more far-reaching. Scientists make models and representations of the world when they make their theories, and arguably, the inability to capture everything at once applies in many if not all scientific fields. “We believe that it is time to move beyond metaphors, and we propose a scientifically pluralist approach that focuses on characterizing fundamental biological properties of microbiomes such as heritability, transmission mode, rates of dispersal rates, and strength of local selection,” Morar and Bohannan write. “Such an approach will allow us to break out of the confines of narrow conceptual frameworks, and to guide the exploration of our complexity as chimeric beings.”

The fact that there still isn’t one “best” metaphor for grasping the microbiome might tell us something much deeper about the world—that perhaps the most promising approach to understanding it is to play with a variety of perspectives, prizing none over the others.