[Taxacom] Congruence in general

[Kirk Fitzhugh]

Ken,

To ease your trepidation, I'm not a philosopher. I'm a systematist. At the start of my ph.d., my advisor suggested that I not spend all my time reading literature on my research group but to read philosophy of science. I've been a voracious reader of the latter ever since.

The context in which I was expressing criticism of congruence is when (1) congruence is used as a means to infer hypotheses that violate the requirement of total evidence, and (2) congruence is claimed to be equivalent to, or a surrogate for testing.

Kirk


-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu on behalf of Kenneth Kinman
Sent: Tue 10/20/2009 7:04 PM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: [Taxacom] Congruence in general
 
Dear All,
      It is with some trepidation that I comment on a debate involving a
philosopher (of science or anything else).  Often it boils down to
semantics and very subtle interpretations of certain terminology.  In
particular in this case, I am particularly wary of what might be meant
by "meaningless congruence". 
      While I agree that strict cladists can sometimes be deceived by
congruence in their datasets (I have detected more than one such case
among dinosaurs in particular), I wonder if these shortcomings could
result in an overreaction to congruence in general.  It seems to me that
"meaningless congruence" is probably a severe problem in such cases, but
I certainly would be hesitant in too often extrapolating those problems
to congruence in general.   Fossil taxa, especially those heavily
studied by the advocates of phylogenetic taxonomy, is a major problem,
but attacking congruence as generally "meaningless"  is probably an
overreaction which risks "throwing out the baby with the bath water". 
       I guess what I am saying is that congruence is a double-edged
sword that can be either helpful or harmful, depending on how one
applies it.  It's a bit like arguing about nuclear energy, which can be
both beneficial in its peaceful applications but also potentially
horrifying when it falls into the wrong hands.
       ---------Ken Kinman
---------------------------------------------------------
J. Kirk Fitzhugh wrote:
My point all along is that we continue not to correctly address testing
in lieu of meaningless congruence, which is no test whatsoever and not a
rational means to assess the veracity of hypotheses.


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