Lumpers and splitters
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Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any
Origin of the terms
The earliest known use of these terms was thought to be Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1857: It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers.[1] But according to research done by Deputy Director at NCSE, Glenn Branch the credit is due to naturalist Edward Newman who wrote in 1845 "The time has arrived for discarding imaginary species, and the duty of doing this is as imperative as the admission of new ones when such are really discovered. The talents described under the respective names of 'hair-splitting' and 'lumping' are unquestionably yielding their power to the mightier power of Truth."[2]
They were introduced more widely by
... splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera ... and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. ... Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat.[3]
A later use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper "On lumpers and splitters ..." by the medical geneticist
Reference to lumpers and splitters in the humanities appeared in a debate in 1975 between
Usage in various fields
Biology
The categorization and naming of a particular species should be regarded as a hypothesis about the evolutionary relationships and distinguishability of that group of organisms. As further information comes to hand, the hypothesis may be confirmed or refuted. Sometimes, especially in the past when communication was more difficult, taxonomists working in isolation have given two distinct names to individual organisms later identified as the same species. When two named species are agreed to be of the same species, the older species name is almost always retained dropping the newer species name honoring a convention known as "priority of nomenclature". This form of lumping is technically called synonymization. Dividing a taxon into multiple, often new, taxa is called splitting. Taxonomists are often referred to as "lumpers" or "splitters" by their colleagues, depending on their personal approach to recognizing differences or commonalities between organisms.
For example, the number of
History
In history, lumpers are those who tend to create broad definitions that cover large periods of time and many disciplines, whereas splitters want to assign names to tight groups of inter-relationships. Lumping tends to create a more and more unwieldy definition, with members having less and less mutually in common. This can lead to definitions which are little more than conventionalities, or groups which join fundamentally different examples. Splitting often leads to "distinctions without difference", ornate and fussy categories, and failure to see underlying similarities.
For example, in the arts, "
Software modelling
Software engineering often proceeds by building models (sometimes known as model-driven architecture). A lumper is keen to generalize, and produces models with a small number of broadly defined objects. A splitter is reluctant to generalize, and produces models with a large number of narrowly defined objects. Conversion between the two styles is not necessarily symmetrical. For example, if error messages in two narrowly defined classes behave in the same way, the classes can be easily combined. But if some messages in a broad class behave differently, every object in the class must be examined before the class can be split. This illustrates the principle that "splits can be lumped more easily than lumps can be split".[14]
Language classification
There is no agreement among
Splitters regard the
Lumpers are more willing to admit techniques like
Religious studies
The idea of a single Hindu religion is essentially a lumper's concept, sometimes also known as
Various "holistic" approaches to religion can prioritise themes such as individual spirituality,[17] the
Philosophy
Physicist and philosophy writer Freeman Dyson has suggested that one can broadly, if over-simplistically, divide "observers of the philosophical scene" into splitters and lumpers - roughly corresponding to materialists (who imagine the world as divided into atoms) and Platonists (who regard the world as made up of ideas).[19]
Psychiatry
In psychiatry, the
'splitters' and the 'lumpers' have fundamentally different approaches to psychiatric diagnosis and classification. First, 'splitters' emphasise the heterogeneity within the diagnostic categories and argue that this heterogeneity drives the 'splitting' process'. 'Lumpers', on the other hand, point to the similarities between the diagnostic categories, and suggest that these similarities justify the creation of broader entities.[20]
Thus lumpers might see "stress" where splitters could identify (say) worry, grief, or some sort of anxiety disorder.
Neuroscience
In neuroscience, "uncertainty aversion" and "uncertainty tolerance" in semantic representations appear to correlate with the terms "splitters" and "lumpers" respectively.[21] As neuroscientist Marc-Lluís Vives observes:
"Our survival is possible because every day we make use of previously acquired categories to navigate the world. Every single mug we encounter is distinct, but fundamentally the same. Thanks to this powerful capacity to classify distinct stimuli under the same category, we can generalize our knowledge from the previously encountered subset of mugs to a future subset of mugs. However, this also posits a dilemma: Is a glass mug still a mug? That is, what are the defining principles that make something a "mug"? Establishing this is fundamental since it also affects its relationship with its close-neighbors. Conceptualizing a mug as very different from a glass creates a more clear-cut mapping between the input—that is, the stimulus perceived—and the output that a person needs to generate—that is, the response, such as drinking coffee. Classical work in cognitive science demonstrates that the more similar two stimuli are, the harder it is to discriminate them and respond with different behavior."[22]
Artificial intelligence and linguistics
Natural Language Processing, using algorithmic approaches such as Word2Vec, provides a way to quantify the overlap or distinguish between semantic categories between words.[23] This can provide a sense of how often the contexts of words overlap or are dissimilar in general usage.
See also
References
- ^ Darwin, Charles (1 August 1857). "Letter no. 2130". Darwin Correspondence Project. Retrieved 10 July 2017.
- ^ Branch, Glenn (December 2, 2014). "Whence Lumpers and Splitters?". ncse.ngo. NCSE. Archived from the original on 19 October 2023. Retrieved 19 October 2023.
- ^ Simpson, George G. (1945). "The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals". Bulletin of the AMNH. 85. New York: American Museum of Natural History: 23.
- S2CID 35339751.
- ^ J.H. Hexter 'The Burden of Proof' TLS 3481 (October 24th, 1975) pp. 2-4
- ^ C. Hill, 'The Burden of Proof' TLS 3843 (November 7th, 1975) p. 17
- ^ R. Cobb and M. Heinemann 'The Burden of Proof' TLS 3844 (November 14th, 1975) p. 16
- ^ J.H. Hexter and R. Hammersely 'The Burden of Proof' TLS 3846 (November 28th, 1975) pp. 19–20. See also the further articles in the TLS by R. McCaughey, P. Zagorin and F.M.L. Thompson.
- JSTOR 25065646
- PMID 24532607
- ^ doi:10.12705/673.2
- doi:10.12705/673.1
- ISBN 9780596008741. Retrieved 2014-10-21.
- ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-08-10. Retrieved 2009-10-25.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) Merritt Ruhlen: Is Algonquian Amerind? - ^
Bradshaw, Paul F., The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. ix. ISBN 0-19-521732-2
- ^
Enrich, Sturm (22 March 2021). Holistic Religion: God-Free, Faith-free, Worship-free; Pro-Individual, Pro-People, Pro-Earth, Pro-Ethics. Sturm Enrich (published 2021). ISBN 9780996113458. Retrieved 11 June 2021.
- ^
Mozaffari, Mehdi (1996). "Islamism in Algeria and Iran". In Sidahmed, Abdel Salam; ISBN 9780429968143. Retrieved 11 June 2021.
[...] the Islamic fundamentalists have a holistic concept of Islam. They believe in the absolute indivisibility of the three famous D's.
- ^ Freeman Dyson, Dreams of Earth and Sky, New York Review Books, 2015, p. 238.
- ^
Starcevic, Vladan (2015). "Classification of anxiety disorders and conceptual and diagnostic issues". In Boyce, Philip; Harris, Anthony; Drobny, Juliette; Lampe, Lisa; Starcevic, Vladan; ISBN 9780994214508. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
The 'splitters' and the 'lumpers' have fundamentally different approaches to psychiatric diagnosis and classification. First, 'splitters' emphasise the heterogeneity within the diagnostic categories and argue that this heterogeneity drives the 'splitting' process'. 'Lumpers', on the other hand, point to the similarities between the diagnostic categories, and suggest that these similarities justify the creation of broader entities.
- . Retrieved 2023-07-29.
- ^ Community, Neuroscience (2023-04-19). "Uncertainty aversion predicts the neural expansion of semantic representations". Neuroscience Community. Retrieved 2023-07-29.
- ISSN 0920-8542.