Lumpers and splitters
Encyclopedia
Lumping and splitting refers to a well-known problem in any discipline which has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper/splitter problem occurs when there is the need to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature
, biological
taxa
and so on. A "lumper" is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.
Another early use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper by the medical geneticist, Victor McKusick: "On lumpers and splitters, or the nosology of genetic disease."
Reference to lumpers and splitters also appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter
and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement. It followed from Hexter's detailed review of Hill's book Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, in which Hill developed Max Weber
's argument that the rise of capitalism was facilitated by Calvinist Puritanism. Hexter objected to Hill's 'mining' of sources to find evidence that supported his theories. Hexter argued that Hill plucked quotations from sources in a way that distorted their meaning. Hexter explained this as a mental habit that he called 'lumping'. According to him, 'Lumpers' rejected differences and chose to emphasize similarities. Any evidence that did not fit their arguments was ignored as aberrant. 'Splitters', in contrast, emphasised differences, and resisted simple schemes. 'Lumpers' consistently tried to create coherent patterns. 'Splitters' preferred incoherent complexity. In a similar vein, historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin
categorized thinkers as 'Hedgehogs' (lumpers) and 'Foxes' (splitters) in his essay on Leo Tolstoy, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox
'.
ary 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 organism
s 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, in the arts, "Romantic" can refer specifically to a period of German
poetry roughly from 1780–1810, but would exclude the later work of Goethe, among other writers. In music it can mean every composer from Hummel
through Rachmaninoff
, plus many that came after.
often proceeds by building models (sometimes known as model-driven architecture
). A lumper is always 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. For example, according to the lumpers, a subcontractor could be basically the same as any other supplier, and is therefore the same class; meanwhile the splitters would probably argue that there are significant differences between different groups of suppliers, justifying separate classes in the model.
about what amount of evidence is needed for two languages to be safely classified in the same language family
. For this reason, many language families have had lumper–splitter controversies, including Altaic
, Pama–Nyungan, Nilo-Saharan, and most of the larger families of the Americas
. At a completely different level, the splitting of mutually intelligible dialect continuum
s into different languages, or lumping them into one, is also an issue that continually comes up, though the consensus in contemporary linguistics is that there is no completely objective way to settle the question.
Splitters regard the comparative method
(meaning not comparison in general, but only reconstruction of a common ancestor or protolanguage) as the only valid proof of kinship, and consider genetic relatedness to be the question of interest. American linguists of recent decades tend to be splitters.
Lumpers are more willing to admit techniques like mass lexical comparison
or lexicostatistics
, and mass typological comparison, and to tolerate the uncertainty of whether relationships found by these methods are the result of linguistic divergence (descent from common ancestor) or language convergence
(borrowing). Much long-range comparison work has been from Russian linguists like Vladislav Illich-Svitych
and Sergei Starostin
. In the US, Greenberg's and Ruhlen's work has been well publicized, though it has met with little acceptance from linguists. Some well-known earlier American linguists like Morris Swadesh
and Edward Sapir
also pursued large-scale classifications like Sapir's 1929 scheme for the Americas, accompanied by controversy similar to that today.
suggests that the same principles of lumping and splitting apply to the study of early Christian liturgy
. Lumpers, who tend to predominate, try to find a single (simple?) line of texts from the apostolic age to the fourth century (and later). Splitters see many parallel and overlapping strands which intermingle and flow apart so that there is not a single coherent path in development of liturgical texts. Liturgical texts must not be taken solely at face value; often there are hidden agendas in texts.
The religion called Hinduism
is essentially a lumper's concept, sometimes also known as Smartism
. Hindu Splitters, and individual adherents, often identify themselves as adherents of a religion such as Shaivism
, Vaishnavism
, or Shaktism
according to which deity they believe to be the supreme creator of the universe.
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, biological
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
taxa
Taxon
|thumb|270px|[[African elephants]] form a widely-accepted taxon, the [[genus]] LoxodontaA taxon is a group of organisms, which a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit. Usually a taxon is given a name and a rank, although neither is a requirement...
and so on. A "lumper" is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.
Origin of the terms
The earliest use of these terms was apparently by Charles Darwin himself, in a letter to J. D. Hooker in 1857. "(Those who make many species are the 'splitters,' and those who make few are the 'lumpers.')" They were introduced more widely by the biologist George G. Simpson in his 1945 work "The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals." As he put it, "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."Another early use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper by the medical geneticist, Victor McKusick: "On lumpers and splitters, or the nosology of genetic disease."
Reference to lumpers and splitters also appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter
J. H. Hexter
Jack H. Hexter was an American historian, a specialist in Tudor and seventeenth century British history, and well known for his comments on historiography.-Early career:...
and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement. It followed from Hexter's detailed review of Hill's book Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, in which Hill developed Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
's argument that the rise of capitalism was facilitated by Calvinist Puritanism. Hexter objected to Hill's 'mining' of sources to find evidence that supported his theories. Hexter argued that Hill plucked quotations from sources in a way that distorted their meaning. Hexter explained this as a mental habit that he called 'lumping'. According to him, 'Lumpers' rejected differences and chose to emphasize similarities. Any evidence that did not fit their arguments was ignored as aberrant. 'Splitters', in contrast, emphasised differences, and resisted simple schemes. 'Lumpers' consistently tried to create coherent patterns. 'Splitters' preferred incoherent complexity. In a similar vein, historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
categorized thinkers as 'Hedgehogs' (lumpers) and 'Foxes' (splitters) in his essay on Leo Tolstoy, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox
The Hedgehog and the Fox
"The Hedgehog and the Fox" is an essay by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin. It was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public. Berlin himself said of the essay: "I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously...
'.
In industry
In the logistics business, it refers to the practice of unloading trucks and breaking down large shipments into smaller ones.In biology
The categorization and naming of a particular species should be regarded as a hypothesis about the evolutionEvolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
ary 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 organism
Organism
In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.An organism may either be unicellular or, as in the case of humans, comprise...
s 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.
In 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. Each approach has its well-known problems. 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, "Romantic" can refer specifically to a period of German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
poetry roughly from 1780–1810, but would exclude the later work of Goethe, among other writers. In music it can mean every composer from Hummel
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
Johann Nepomuk Hummel or Jan Nepomuk Hummel was an Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era.- Life :...
through Rachmaninoff
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...
, plus many that came after.
In software modelling
Software engineeringSoftware engineering
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
often proceeds by building models (sometimes known as model-driven architecture
Model-driven architecture
Model-driven architecture is a software design approach for the development of software systems. It provides a set of guidelines for the structuring of specifications, which are expressed as models. Model-driven architecture is a kind of domain engineering, and supports model-driven engineering of...
). A lumper is always 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. For example, according to the lumpers, a subcontractor could be basically the same as any other supplier, and is therefore the same class; meanwhile the splitters would probably argue that there are significant differences between different groups of suppliers, justifying separate classes in the model.
In language classification
There is no agreement among historical linguistsHistorical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
about what amount of evidence is needed for two languages to be safely classified in the same language family
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
. For this reason, many language families have had lumper–splitter controversies, including Altaic
Altaic languages
Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
, Pama–Nyungan, Nilo-Saharan, and most of the larger families of the Americas
Classification schemes for indigenous languages of the Americas
This article is a list of different language classification proposals developed for indigenous languages of the Americas. The article is divided into North, Central, and South America sections; however, the classifications do not always neatly correspond to these continent divisions.-Gallatin...
. At a completely different level, the splitting of mutually intelligible dialect continuum
Dialect continuum
A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the...
s into different languages, or lumping them into one, is also an issue that continually comes up, though the consensus in contemporary linguistics is that there is no completely objective way to settle the question.
Splitters regard the comparative method
Comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
(meaning not comparison in general, but only reconstruction of a common ancestor or protolanguage) as the only valid proof of kinship, and consider genetic relatedness to be the question of interest. American linguists of recent decades tend to be splitters.
Lumpers are more willing to admit techniques like mass lexical comparison
Mass lexical comparison
Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison...
or lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...
, and mass typological comparison, and to tolerate the uncertainty of whether relationships found by these methods are the result of linguistic divergence (descent from common ancestor) or language convergence
Language convergence
Language convergence is a type of contact-induced change whereby languages with many bilingual speakers mutually borrow morphological and syntactic features, making their typology more similar....
(borrowing). Much long-range comparison work has been from Russian linguists like Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych was a Russian linguist and accentologist, also a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Of Ukrainian descent, he was born in Kiev but later moved to work in Moscow. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally expounded by...
and Sergei Starostin
Sergei Starostin
Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
. In the US, Greenberg's and Ruhlen's work has been well publicized, though it has met with little acceptance from linguists. Some well-known earlier American linguists like Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas...
and Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics....
also pursued large-scale classifications like Sapir's 1929 scheme for the Americas, accompanied by controversy similar to that today.
In liturgical studies
Paul F. BradshawPaul F. Bradshaw
Paul F. Bradshaw is Professor of Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame.A specialist in the early history of Christian liturgy, he has taught at the University of Notre Dame since 1985...
suggests that the same principles of lumping and splitting apply to the study of early Christian liturgy
Liturgy
Liturgy is either the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to its particular traditions or a more precise term that distinguishes between those religious groups who believe their ritual requires the "people" to do the "work" of responding to the priest, and those...
. Lumpers, who tend to predominate, try to find a single (simple?) line of texts from the apostolic age to the fourth century (and later). Splitters see many parallel and overlapping strands which intermingle and flow apart so that there is not a single coherent path in development of liturgical texts. Liturgical texts must not be taken solely at face value; often there are hidden agendas in texts.
The religion called Hinduism
Hinduism
Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions...
is essentially a lumper's concept, sometimes also known as Smartism
Smartism
Smarta Sampradaya is a liberal or nonsectarian denomination of the Vedic Hindu religion which accept all the major Hindu deities as forms of the one Brahman, in contrast to Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and Shaktism, the other three major Hindu sects, which revere Vishnu, Shiva, and Shakti,...
. Hindu Splitters, and individual adherents, often identify themselves as adherents of a religion such as Shaivism
Shaivism
Shaivism is one of the four major sects of Hinduism, the others being Vaishnavism, Shaktism and Smartism. Followers of Shaivism, called "Shaivas," and also "Saivas" or "Saivites," revere Shiva as the Supreme Being. Shaivas believe that Shiva is All and in all, the creator, preserver, destroyer,...
, Vaishnavism
Vaishnavism
Vaishnavism is a tradition of Hinduism, distinguished from other schools by its worship of Vishnu, or his associated Avatars such as Rama and Krishna, as the original and supreme God....
, or Shaktism
Shaktism
Shaktism is a denomination of Hinduism that focuses worship upon Shakti or Devi – the Hindu Divine Mother – as the absolute, ultimate Godhead...
according to which deity they believe to be the supreme creator of the universe.
External links
- Abstraction: Lumpers and Splitters
- Lumper Vs. Splitter on TV Tropes, a wiki dedicated to recurring themes in fiction, metafiction, and real lifeTV TropesTV Tropes is a wiki which collects and expands on various conventions and devices found within creative works. Since its establishment in 2004, the site has gone from covering only television and film tropes to also covering those in a number of other media such as literature, comics, video-games,...