USEFUL GENERALIZATION OR DETRIMENTAL OVERSIMPLIFICATION: AN EXAMPLE FROM THE HISTORY OF GEOMORPHOLOGY

Generalization is an extremely helpful, and indeed necessary, conceptual process for learning in any field, including the earth sciences. It has been said that people would go insane without the ability to group the infinite variety of individual phenomena into a smaller number of categories based on similar properties. The characteristics on which a particular classification system is constructed depend on the framer’s goals and interests, and thus any one item, or case, can be a member of multiple classification systems. In science, such classification (generalization) promotes, among other things, the ability to (1) explain an individual case and its related processes by analogy with categorically similar cases, and (2) test hypotheses of explanation for multiple cases at one time.

As with other phenomena, people, including earth scientists, are frequently classified, labeled, or grouped according to various characteristics, some of which may relate to their professional interests and approaches. With the passage of time, those individuals who evolve into major historical figures within their discipline are further generalized, classified, and labeled for their contributions according to the perspective of later practitioners. Although such generalization of important previous workers is unavoidable, helps to explain the present state of the discipline, and can make the discipline more engaging for students, it also suffers from oversimplification of those individuals’ work and an obscuring of the fuller range of their contributions. This paper illustrates these concepts using the case study of W.M. Davis (1850-1934) and G.K. Gilbert (1843-1918) from the history of geomorphology.