Markets are intersections of buyers and sellers brought together to exchange goods and services most efficiently, so the theory goes. In fact, markets are also connected to barter and exchange and to their underlying value: resourcefulness. We look at Nina Katchadourian and her artwork made on airplanes ("Seat Assignment") as an example of resourcefulness, Caroline Woolard’s Work Dress as an example of barter, and Elizabeth Cleland’s exhibition as an example of equivalencies created by markets. We introduce supply and demand, how the graphs are constructed, and how to think about shifts in supply and demand.

This chapter connects philosophy of ecology with two central issues in philosophy of science: what marks the real, and the nature of laws of nature. On the former, biological communities are the problem case. Are they anything more than the individual organisms of different species comprising them? Answering requires evaluation of community structure and dynamics, species distribution patterns, and how interspecific groups might assemble into communities. Individualists, for example, argue species distributions along environmental gradients overlap continuously and significantly, do not form discrete boundaries, and that communities are only real if such distinct boundaries exist. On laws, various challenges confront the idea of distinctively ecological laws: the relative paucity of predictive success in ecology, that its models and experimental results lack sufficient generality, that candidate laws are riddled with exceptions, and that ecosystems are too complex. Some philosophers argue that other properties thought to preclude a discipline from trading in laws – limited predictive accuracy and generality, not being exceptionless – should be jettisoned. Ecology, they argue, has uncovered regularities – Gause’s law of competitive exclusion and numerous allometries – possessing a kind of necessity and therefore meriting the “natural law.” These arguments are found wanting.