This paper recovers and refines the method of residues—a historical and philosophical framework for anomaly-driven inquiry—through an examination of its origins and enduring role in the geosciences. We first reconstruct how John Herschel and William Whewell formulated this method in the early nineteenth century as a strategy for investigating complex systems with multiple interacting causes. While the method has been primarily associated with astronomy, we highlight its equally significant roots in the geosciences, especially in paleoclimatology and tidal research. We then trace its continued application in twentieth-century studies of the Earth’s solid-body tides, where researchers iteratively used residual discrepancies between theoretical models and precise measurements to uncover new physical causes and refine models of the Earth’s elasticity, internal structure, and oceanic loading. Drawing on this history, we develop a taxonomy of residues—distinguishing between discrepancies between theory and observation and those between alternative measurements—and argue that both constitute productive, quantitative anomalies. We conclude that the method of residues exemplifies a distinctive, iterative role for anomalies in scientific practice, one that advances research without crisis or theory change, and offers insights into the epistemic strategies by which the geosciences progressively disentangle the many causes shaping our planet.

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This paper provides a critical literature review on the philosophy of human and biodiversity in the geosciences. We examine how biodiversity is defined across studies of human and bio-diversity and highlight distinctions between analyses of contemporary and past biodiversity, with particular attention to challenges in taxon identification—such as species concepts and classification—and in reconstructing relationships among lineages. We also address the methodological and epistemic difficulties involved in reconstructing biodiversity over time. Drawing on the philosophical literature, we classify works according to the types of data they engage with and the reasoning strategies they employ. Finally, we explore enduring philosophical themes through case studies that have inspired reflection on the origins, evolution, and ultimately decline of biodiversity.

Philosphers have traditionally focused on the underdetermination of theories by evidence. However, many instances of underdetermination occur at a different scale, between data, models, and inferential methods. By looking at demographic inferences from contemporary genetic information to past human population, I distinguish between parameter identifiability and model misspecification as two different undetertermination problems, arising at different moments of the inferential process. This distinction, in turn, helps to understand the relationship between different scientific practices, such as model building and and evidence assessment in cases of underdetermination within inferential methods. It also advances a specific debate on underdetermination within the historical sciences, looking at how conditions of epistemic complexity (rather than epistemic scarcity) impact our knowledge of human origins.

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