Lumpers and splitters
Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any academic discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories.
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 the 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.
[4] Reference to lumpers and splitters in the humanities appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement.
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.
Taxonomists are often referred to as "lumpers" or "splitters" by their colleagues, depending on their personal approach to recognizing differences or commonalities between organisms.
[12] Defending PPG I, Schuettpelz et al. (2018) argue that the larger number of genera is a result of "the gradual accumulation of new collections and new data" and hence "a greater appreciation of fern diversity and [..] an improved ability to distinguish taxa".
[12] 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.
For example, in the arts, "Romantic" can refer specifically to a period of German poetry roughly from 1780 to 1810, but would exclude the later work of Goethe, among other writers.
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.
Lumpers, who tend to predominate in this field, try to find a single line of successive 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 the development of liturgical texts.
[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.
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]Natural language processing, using algorithmic approaches such as Word2Vec, provides a way to quantify the overlap or distinguish between semantic categories between words.
