T18 Case Studies in the History & Philosophy of the Geosciences: People, Places, & Things

Sunday, 9 October 2022
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
407

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

Paper number: T18-4
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:35 AM – 8:50 AM

Authors

Abstract

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.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 54, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2022AM-383815

© Copyright 2022 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to the author(s) of this abstract to reproduce and distribute it freely, for noncommercial purposes. Permission is hereby granted to any individual scientist to download a single copy of this electronic file and reproduce up to 20 paper copies for noncommercial purposes advancing science and education, including classroom use, providing all reproductions include the complete content shown here, including the author information. All other forms of reproduction and/or transmittal are prohibited without written permission from GSA Copyright Permissions.