Lumpers or splitters?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People commonly classify things by looking at them in two different ways. They long have been characterized as lumpers and splitters (or sometimes hair-splitters). Lumpers focus on similarities and create fewer, larger categories; splitters focus on differences and create more, smaller categories.

 

A massive 64-page preprint article by Robert M. Hazen et al at American Minerologist on July 24, 2021 titled Lumping and splitting: Towards a classification of mineral natural kinds references such distinctions in biology, history, linguistics, philosophy psychiatry, and sociology.

 

Another article by Miles Kimball at Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal on July 23, 2020 titled Lumpers vs. splitters: Economists as lumpers; Psychologists as splitters explained:

 

“In a broader sense, a ‘lumper’ is someone who tries to explain many phenomena as being in some deep sense similar and arising from similar forces. A ‘splitter’ who someone who emphasize how each different phenomenon is its own type of thing, different from other phenomena.

 

…. Having rubbed shoulders with psychologists as well as, of course, many economists, I think it is true that, psychologists tend to be splitters, while economists tend to be lumpers. Economists usually try their best to explain new phenomena with small modifications of old theories. Psychologists like to try to show that a new phenomenon they have identified is a new type of thing and are happy to develop a new theory for that new thing.”

 

On September 20, 2021 there is an xkcd comic by Randall Munroe titled Lumpers and splitters with the following dialogue:

 

Megan (lumper): Really, we’re both just categorization pedants.

Cueball (splitter): Ahh, so you’re a meta-lumper.

 

Images of a spade and hatchet were colored in from those from Pearson Scott Foresman at Wikimedia Commons.