Twitter Nerd-Fight Reveals a Long, Bizarre Scientific Feud

Well actually they said that you'll need to defend it on philosophical grounds. Not that it has to philosophically better rather than scientifically so. And that's not why it seems they are dropping science for dogma. They seem to be doing this by make a 'dogmatic' declaration that certain methods have yet to prove themselves able to stand alone in their journal {That's my best attempt to spin this as dogmatic in any sense}.While Elsen may dislike their position it doesn't sound dogmatic, more pragmatic:

quote:

---

The epistemological paradigm of this journal is parsimony. There are strong philosophical arguments in support of parsimony versus other methods of phylogenetic inference (e.g. Farris, 1983).

​

The high citation index of Cladistics shows that the journal is publishing some of the most ground-breaking empirical and theoretical research on the history of life, and we remain committed to the publication of outstanding systematics research. As a community of scientists, the Willi Hennig Society is always open to new methods and ideas, and to well-reasoned criticisms of old ones. However, we do not hold in special esteem any method solely because it is novel or purportedly sophisticated.

​

Phylogenetic data sets submitted to this journal should be analysed using parsimony. If alternative methods are also used and there is no difference among the results, the author should defer to the principles of the Society and present the tree obtained by parsimony. Unless there is a pertinent reason to include multiple trees from alternative methods, a tree based on parsimony is sufficient as an intelligible, informative and repeatable hypothesis of relationships, and articles should not be cluttered with multiple, often redundant, trees produced from other methods. If alternative methods give different results and the author prefers an unparsimonious topology, he or she is welcome to present that result, but should be prepared to defend it on philosophical grounds.

​

In keeping with numerous theoretical and empirical discussions of methodology published in this journal, we do not consider the hypothetical problem of statistical inconsistency to constitute a philosophical argument for the rejection of parsimony. All phylogenetic methods, including parsimony, may produce inconsistent or otherwise inaccurate results for a given data set. The absence of certain truth represents a philosophical limit of empirical science.

​

Cladistics will publish research based on methods that are repeatable, clearly articulated and philosophically sound. We believe these guidelines implement the vision of Willi Hennig (1965, p. 97), who said, (i)nvestigation of the phylogenetic relationship between all existing species and the expression of the results of this research in a form which cannot be misunderstood, is the task of phylogenetic systematics.

---

I mean, good luck trying to argue that something is 'scientifically better' without resorting to philosophy. Given your first step must surely be to define 'scientifically better', you plunge into philosophy from the outset. Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

And the question I asked in response was 'How are you going to defend the epistemic superiority of a method without resorting to philosophy?' Saying your journal prefers parsimony and if authors want to use others they have to preset a defence of this is not dogmatic. It's a policy:

quote:

---

dogma: a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted

---

quote:

---

what they said: All phylogenetic methods, including parsimony, may produce inconsistent or otherwise inaccurate results for a given data set. The absence of certain truth represents a philosophical limit of empirical science.

---

hrm, yes when did a journal that focussed on gaining knowledge about the relationships between groups of entities suddenly get philosophical?Oh wait, that IS philosophy. It's a philosophy of nature. A natural philosophy - if you will. Quick let's shroud the whole think with the Latin word for knowledge 'scientia' rather than the Greek one (epistēmē ) so nobody will suspect we're doing dirty philosophy.OK so that was tongue in cheek, but there are groups of scientists who both hate philosophy and reject that they do it for a living. I would have thought, even if they couldn't be persuaded, they would have made the empirical observation that there other scientists who regard their activities as sort of a subset of philosophy and that therefore they would have learned to NOT meltdown whenever the word philosophy gets raised by said scientists. They should replace it mentally with 'methodology' or something and try going from there. If you think that's reason to publish them, your argument for so doing would be a philosophical one. They aren't.They say they will uniformly accept results from parsimony methods in their journal and that the use of other methods, if the author believes them better, will need to be defended.It's not dogmatic and creepy for them to reject papers on the atmospheric conditions of TransNeptunian objects. They have a focus, a scope for their journal. They have reasons for adopting this scope. They are free to reject every paper that comes to them. They are free adopt policies.If it's a terrible idea, maybe they'll lose their impact.if it's not, then people who don't want to defend alternate methods may go elsewhere to get published or they may just publish the parsimony tree and their preferred one along with a brief defense as to why they prefer theirs. Or something.

And I challenged this position in my first post:

quote:

---

I mean, good luck trying to argue that something is 'scientifically better' without resorting to philosophy. Given your first step must surely be to define 'scientifically better', you plunge into philosophy from the outset.

---

And in my second

quote:

---

'How are you going to defend the epistemic superiority of a method without resorting to philosophy?'

---

Show me the difference using the subject at hand, Cladistics. It depends when you are doing it. In 1869, this is probably still a discussion one might find in scientific journals. The real question is, what's the difference? You can keep repeating it, but it's going to take more than repetition to persuade me that someone who says
'We prefer method x. Please use method x if you want us to publish your work. If you want to use another method instead, you may do so, but you must defend your decision' is being dogmatic. Your opinion on their reasons (which I disagree with), is not a factor in determining dogmatism.
Dogmatism is ruthlessly inflexible and would assert that Parsimony is the only true method. Which is exactly the opposite of what they did. Science is, of course, a branch of philosophy. No it isn't. And that's my point. We are talking 'philosophy in the colloquial sense'. We are talking in a technical sense. In a technical sense Cladistics is a philosophy journal in that it is a scientific one. Scientists are meant to be expert philosophers. They are after all, professional philosophers. But they don't have to be, its just that Cladistics has standards. If some scientists can't meet those standards, they can try to publish elsewhere.I wouldn't expect sentences such as 'epistemic merits' or 'Occam's razor'. I'd find phrases such as 'in this case Parsimony methods are so inaccurate as to be deceptive, for completeness we include those results in Appendix II'. So why the complaint? I agree. But let's break this apart. First, science is a branch of philosophy. So it would be correct to say there are goods lines of philosophical evidence. Whether something is 'Good' as a line of evidence is an epistemological concern and is thus philosophy. 'Falsifiability' is philosophy concept and so is 'Pragmatism' and 'Superiority'. So merely by stating your position and using only 4 words in its defence (good, falsifiable, pragmatically superior) you have created a a philosophical defence.Which takes me right back to the start

quote:

---

I mean, good luck trying to argue that something is 'scientifically better' without resorting to philosophy. Given your first step must surely be to define 'scientifically better', you plunge into philosophy from the outset.

---

quote:

---

'How are you going to defend the epistemic superiority of a method without resorting to philosophy?'

---

Science decided to adopt the philosophy of strict falsificationism at or around the time of Popper. One can do science that is unfalsifiable, by some reckoning of the term, but otherwise science has more or less decided that a minimal entry requirement to be worthy of the label 'science' is falsifiability. This, of course, is a blatant philosophical position, which makes sense if science is a subset of philosophy, which until a couple of centuries ago everyone basically agreed on.Falsifiability is a quality a philosophical argument might possess or lack. Being falsifiable does not make something scientific. For simple example: All cats are bright purple. This is falsifiable, but it is not scientific. It is not scientific because the hypothesis was not based on observation and a hypothetico-deductive process (or whatever), I just pulled it out of a random concept generator in my head. If I turn around, I see a black and white cat. The philosophical view on universal purple cats is falsified.To repeat, to a reasonable approximation a philosophical position has to be falsifiable to qualify as science, but possessing those qualities isn't sufficient for science, and even if it were - it doesn't exclude it being philosophy. It gives the authors more scope. Think about it. How does this actual reason differ from their stated reason?

quote:

---

The epistemological paradigm of this journal is parsimony.

---

I'm arguing there isn't a demarcation as such. Science is a subset of philosophy. Dawkins
wrote some excellent philosophic works on neo-Darwinian evolution (eg., The Blind Watchmaker) and Dan Dennett has done so while explicitly and openly being a philosopher (eg., Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life). Also Stephen Gould's On The Structure of Evolutionary Theory may serve as an example of a philosophical work on the subject. I wouldn't commit to familiar. I am aware of the broad strokes. So why is Cladistics' announcement vaguely interesting to anyone? It's just making explicit what would be obvious with an examination of the history. Depends on your meaning of 'exactly'. They cite Farris, J.S., 1983. The logical basis of phylogenetic analysis. In: Platnick, N.I., Funk, V.A. (Eds.), Advances in Cladistics. Columbia University Press, New York, Vol. 2, pp. 7—36.
Hennig, W., 1965. Phylogenetic systematics. Annu. Rev. Entomol. 10, 97—116.
CrossRef,Web of Science Times Cited: 334