5.1 Introduction: As the chapters in this book will no doubt serve to remind us, nosology represents many things to psychiatry. It is a repository of its history, a crucible for its theories and controversies. Systems of classification crystallize the scientific content of psychiatry at any given moment. Indeed, the very fact of nosological systems-that they exist at all-is emblematic of psychiatry's status as a basic science and branch of medicine. Prior to any of these historical and foundational roles, however, psychiatric classification is an exercise in grouping like with like, an activity referred to as taxonomy, clustering, or cladistics. Taxonomy is a distinct, technical, and well-developed field in biology and statistics. Any given system of psychiatric nosology, in addition to its implicit or explicit commitments to ideas about the genesis of disordered behavior, represents at the same time a set of choices about taxonomic methods per se.
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