Science and Sentiment: Grinnell’s Fact-Based Philosophy of Biodiversity Conservation AYELET SHAVIT Departments of Interdisciplinary Studies and of Environmental Sciences Tel Hai College 12210 Upper Galilee Israel E-mail: ashavit@telhai.ac.il JAMES R. GRIESEMER Department of Philosophy University of California One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 USA E-mail: jrgriesemer@ucdavis.edu Abstract. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generaliza- tions on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to some familiar philosophical distinctions such as fact versus value, emotion versus reason and basic versus applied science. According to Grinnell, unlike sentiment-based generalizations, a fact-based generalization traces its diverse commitments and thus becomes tractable for its audience. We argue that foregrounding tractability better explains Grinnell’s practice in the context of his time as well as in the context of current discourse among scientists over the political ‘‘biases’’ of biodiversity research and its problem of ‘‘reproducibility.’’ Keywords: Generalization, Tractability, Fact, Value, Sentiment, Biodiversity, MVZ, Replication, Reproducibility Why Should We Care About Science Versus Sentiment? At six o’clock in the evening, September 3rd 2007, at an elevation of 8323 feet, with a breath-taking view of Lake Helen and the towering Journal of the History of Biology Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 DOI 10.1007/s10739-017-9489-4