Aspectos epistemológicos sobre la clasificación biológica y la praxis de la sistemática filogenética

Abstract

Biological classification is addressed from an epistemic-methodological perspective that analyzes the disciplinary practice of taxonomy, on how species are delimited and their phylogenetic relationships are stablished. It is argued that the definition of a taxonomic species neither implies the hypothetic - deductive method nor the inductive approach. The argumentative model of Toulmin (2003) is suggested as a theoretical tool to establish attributes and limits to these taxonomic definitions. Thus, the use of the hypothesis is relevant in phylogenetic analysis only concerning monophyly or evolutionary history of taxa.