[Taxacom] Multiple views, singular views, and hopelessness

[Robinwbruce at aol.com]

Interesting comment and interesting thread............
 
When exactly did classification and description become pejorative terms in  
science?  That would give us a date for the start of science as  
hubris..............and the (correlated?) diminishing of the value of  taxonomic 
thought and effort. 
 
Cheers
 
Robin
 
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 9/1/2013 1:58:08 A.M. GMT Daylight Time,  
stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz writes:

I think  that the "hypothesis" aspect is often overstated by taxonomists in 
defence of  taxonomy. The reality is that taxonomy is mostly descriptive 
and opinion, but  that's not a bad thing  ...

Stephen


________________________________
From:  Fred Schueler <bckcdb at istar.ca>
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu  
Sent: Sunday, 1 September 2013 12:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Multiple  views, singular views, and hopelessness


On 8/31/2013 6:35 PM, Bob  Mesibov wrote:

>  But taxonomists *are* experts in the eyes of  non-taxonomists, and 
although you might think that taxonomy doesn't rank very  highly as a science (no 
mega-funding, regarded as stamp-collecting by some  'hard science' 
practitioners), none of my taxonomic-story-telling listeners  ever seemed to doubt 
that what I did was real science.

* the historical  sciences, especially taxonomy, are the hard sciences, 
because you can't do  experiments, and must test all hypotheses 
indirectly, which is  intrinsically difficult. The term is widely misused 
for the indoor or  'easy' sciences, where experiments and direct 
observation make it  relatively simple to test  hypotheses.

fred.
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