well said. cladists seem mostly to be trying to rid their analysis of unwanted ‘noise’, what some people call ‘context’. (purification step) perhaps best reason is to achieve standardization and mutual intelligibility among practitioners — ethnicization of the discourse so to speak. but tendency when one moves to conciliate, is followed by belief in fear that others may colonize the discourse, so then followed by retrenchment of the technique, and then bracketing the ‘context’ into a different sub-discipline or a separate community of practitioners. at best we might look for conversation between communities of practitioners. can that lead to unexpected conciliation?