The nature of parsimony and instrumentalism in systematics

Abstract

This paper traces the historical and philosophical roots of the principle of parsimony, and its incorporation in empiricist philosophy of science. It is argued that phylogeny reconstruction looks back to the empiricist tradition in its application of parsimony. The radical coherentism that motivates the application of parsimony in direct optimization of sequence alignment results in an instrumentalist approach to phylogeny reconstruction. A similarly instrumentalist perspective motivated the ‘barcoding’ initiative in taxonomy and bioconservation. This is contrasted with a realist conception of systematics.

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