Lumpy Logic

The use of an argument which recognises that systems—such as social systems—tend to settle down into reasonably well-defined characteristics. For example, a nation contains a wide variety of schools, farms, forms of local government, etc, ranging from the good to the bad; however, generalisations about them are quite likely to be true: e.g., “Nation A’s schools are generally better than Nation B’s” sounds like a ridiculous generalisation but may well not be. This is because all the schools in that particular society may be subject to the same system and develop in response to it.

The idea of “lumpiness” has been suggested in, for instance, the phenomenon of the size of animals in an ecology. The ecologists C.S. Holling, Lance Gunderson and Garry Petersen suggest that the phenomenon of groups of animals in an ecology being approximately the same size contributes to the system’s resilience: if one of the species in a size group suffers a setback of some kind, others can step in and fill the gap. This is “imbricated [overlapping] redundancy”. Many complex systems, such as languages, have—and depend on—this bounded diversity.^L222

Related entries:

Needs and Wants.