Answer 1:
The word "naturalist" can mean a few
things:
1) a student of natural history,
2) a biologist who studies the impact of living
species on each other and on the environment
(EnvironmentalScience.org), or
3) a person who believes that only natural laws
(not supernatural or spiritual laws) govern the
world.
This word (naturalist) was used frequently in
the past to describe scientists who studied nature
(compared to scientists who studied machines such
as physicists). In the past, a plant biologist
might have been called a naturalist. If we take
the three definitions here, then we can see that
naturalists can be a subset of scientists
according to definitions 1) or 2), or that
scientists can be naturalists according to
definition 3) but do not have to be.
In other words, if we say that the word
"naturalist" describes a person who believes in
only natural laws and not supernatural/spiritual
phenomena, then some scientists are definitely
naturalists because they hold this belief, but not
all scientists have to be naturalists because some
scientist may also believe that there are
supernatural/spiritual phenomena that are not
described completely by physics/chemistry/biology
and so on. There may be many more definitions of
the word "naturalist", but we see that the
relationship between "scientists" and
"naturalists" is different for different
definitions of "naturalist".
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Answer 2:
A naturalist is a specific type of scientist
who studies the natural universe, i.e. what
exists in nature, instead of understanding the
principles of nature in the laboratory. Thus,
ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists,
paleontologists, astronomers, and atmospheric
scientists are all naturalists.
Physicists, chemists, and microbial
geneticists are scientists, but are not
naturalists, because they do their work in the
lab and not in the field.
I don't know if there is a term for people who
use the scientific method but work in the social
sciences (such as psychologists, economists,
etc.). There are also some scientists, like
archaeologists and anthropologists, that blur the
line (they work in the field like naturalists, but
the things that they study are either human or
human-made, and thus arguably not "natural").
Answer #3
Naturalists are a kind of biological scientist, as
the word is usually used today:
Here's a definition for naturalist: a student of
natural history
especially : a field biologist
There's also an old definition for naturalist: one
that advocates or practices naturalism, where
'naturalism' is:
1 : action, inclination, or thought based only on
natural desires and instincts
2 : a theory denying that an event or object has a
supernatural significance
specifically : the doctrine that scientific laws
are adequate to account for all phenomena
Helen
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