Geography as a Positivist Science
Let us now discuss the question of geography's scientific status in earnest, adding substance to the sketch provided above. For the term 'science' has not just been a rhetorical weapon used by geographers it has also described specific ways of investigating reality. It is these ways I want now to explain in this and the next two sections before moving on to an assessment of geography's scientific credentials. I suggested above that the first substantive attempt to make geography a science was a...
Conclusion Pux
In our example we demonstrate that scientific discourses of development - pervasive in the media, popular culture, scholarship and indeed classrooms - have roots in dominant explanations of how economic development 'should' proceed, and how it is currently lacking supposedly threatening the environment, food supply, etc. in the Global South. We have also demonstrated that these discourses are remarkably tenacious and continue to persist because they are bolstered by a series of material and...
Process and Form in Modern Geography
In the United States, geography as an academic discipline emerged mainly through the initiative of geologists cum geographers. The most prominent and influential individual in this regard was William Morris Davis. As a champion of geography, Davis had a profound impact on virtually the entire intellectual domain of the fledgling discipline however, his legacy derived mainly from advocacy for two theories the cycle of erosion and environmental determinism. The former dominated not only...
Conclusion 1
What can we conclude from this discussion It is clear that there is not, and never has been, a single thing called Science with a capital S that can be used as a benchmark against which to measure the research practices of geographers or anyone else. It is equally clear that geography as a whole is a 'science' only if we employ a vernacular, insubstantial, and ultimately rather trivial definition of the word. The real question, therefore, is this what kind of sciences are those parts of human...
World Knowledge and Discipline
Geographers are fond of saying that what 'ties the discipline together' is an attention to phenomena insofar as they are distributed in space. At the same time, and like other scholars, geographers tend to see their discipline as divided into subdisciplines. There is economic geography, bio-geography, and so on. Here a similar strategy is invoked it is held that economic geography concerns spatial aspects of economic phenomena, that biogeography concerns spatial aspects of living things, and so...
A Divided Discipline
'Physical geographers are from Mars, Human geographers are from Venus'. Discuss.1 Geography is in an unusual position. Along with a few other subjects such as psychology and archaeology, it straddles the divide between the physical or natural sciences and the social sciences. This position can be seen as, on the one hand, geography's unique and vital strength and, on the other, a grave impediment or problem for the subject. Many geographers over many years have argued that the bridging role of...
Where Next
Gazing into the crystal ball for insights into tomorrow's world is always a dangerous game, and I do not want to make any predictions about the future of geography. There is no reason why all of the above future scenarios re-integration, co-existence, splitting up cannot occur at different times in different places. I doubt very much that there is one, unitary future of geography, just as there has been no single history of geography. Conflicts and debates between physical and human geography...
David Demeritt and John Wainwright
From forecasting the weather to the economy, models have become ubiquitous, if little-noticed, features of modern life. Models of various sorts are used to predict and thereby manage everything from whether it's likely to rain on your picnic to the responses of consumers to changes in interest rates. In turn, those practical applications depend upon and help to inform the development and use of models in the context of pure research. Modelling has arguably become the most widespread and...
Cartographic visualization exploring geography
In contrast to the communication model of cartography, the visualization model of cartography is relatively new and still evolving. Currently there are very few rules, procedures and consensus governing the process of cartographic visualization. Instead the emphasis is upon the user's own personal preferences, ideas and agendas with the aim of discovering something new and hopefully interesting about the world. The purpose of cartographic visualization is to facilitate data exploration,...
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editorial and production teams at Blackwell publishers, Sarah Falkus, Jane Hotchkiss, Will Maddox, Justin Vaughan, Angela Cohen, Brian Johnson, Katherine Wheatley, Simon Alexander, and especially Kelvin Matthews for seeing the project home. Many thanks also to Susan Dunsmore for copy-editing and to Sara Hawker for proofing. We are grateful for the constructive comments from Rob Kitchin, an anonymous reviewer and our many colleagues. Finally, we wish to thank the...
Geography since The Turn to Process
Near the middle of the twentieth century, a sea change took place throughout geography. The initial hallmark of this shift was an adoption of the 'scientific method', particularly the method associated with logical empiricism, which at this time was reaching its zenith of influence throughout science. Approaches to geographical analysis shifted from largely descriptive to largely quantitative in both human and physical geography, bringing the two sides of the discipline closer together. Since...
Map Making and MythMaking A Classic Example of Map Use
One of my first recollections of being interested in maps and mapping was at school when I watched a TV series about Victorian London. The series was concerned with the social conditions of London and one programme was about the frequent cholera epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century. It was this programme that grabbed my attention since it told a very interesting story of how the link was made between cholera and dirty drinking water by the use of a map. At the time, it was generally accepted...
NonLinearity and Complexity
The landscape which many physical geographers study is, then, a very much more complex set of systems than the early positivist, quantitative practitioners expected Harrison et al., 2004 . It is driven by processes which are, in the main, non-linear and this obscures cause and effect relationships. Non-linear systems are those whose causal powers are not derivable from the aggregations of lower-level behaviour, since these cannot be known. In this sense, it may be that all cases of...
Maureen Hickey and Vicky Lawson
F rom its modern foundations, geography has designated itself a science, and it prospers less when this role diminishes. A real science is able to accept even the shameful, dirty stories of its beginning. Foucault, 1988, quoted in Kirby, 1994 300 As the title of this chapter indicates, there is an ongoing struggle over legitimate knowledge within human geography, centred around what many in the discipline identify as a science beyond-science binary. While we do not deny that there are...
What Divides Geography and Policy
To the extent to which there is a problematic relationship between Geography and policy, it can be discussed under two headings. First, there are internal features of the discipline, widely shared with other sciences, that inhibit the involvement of geographers in relevant work. Second, there are obstacles in the relationship between the two communities. I will say less about the policy realm itself, although its limitations will be evident from the discussion. There are many hierarchies in the...
Noel Castree 1
If you're reading these words you're almost certainly a student studying degree-level geography in an English-speaking country. This chapter is probably on a reading list for a course you're taking on the nature of contemporary geography. Whether you're an undergraduate or a Master's student, the course is doubtless a compulsory part of your degree. You may not like this fact. Unless you're intending to go on to become a university geographer yourself, you may well think that the course is both...
The Degree Business Geography as a Commodity
Academic disciplines have never been insulated from wider governmental, economic or cultural forces. As David Harvey 1996 95 famously put it, geography 'cannot be understood independently of the . . . societies in which it is embedded'. The 'nature' of geography is thus determined not only by internal struggles within the discipline - like those between the aforementioned Gillian Rose and her antagonists - but also by external influences. The geographer Allen Scott 1982 was among the first to...
Bruce L Rhoads
The way we think about the world shapes human inquiry. The purpose of the categorical concepts we use is to organize thought so that distinctions among ideas about the world can be discerned. Once an initial set of categories has been developed, inquiry becomes possible by associating characteristics of the world with ideas embedded in relevant concepts. Enmeshed within categorical concepts are ontological and epistemo-logical presuppositions, i.e. underlying philosophical notions about the...
Scott Orford
The International Cartographic Association ICA describes a map as 'a symbolized image of geographical reality, representing selected features or characteristics' ICA, 1995 1 . Maps have been representing 'selected features or characteristics of geographical reality' for millennia and considerably longer than the discipline called 'geography' has been recognized and taught. But being useful, effective and well-established tools in representing the world around us, maps were readily adopted by...
Geography Coming Apart at the Seams
Rather than police the margins of the discipline, let's stretch them. Geography is an open, vibrant and exciting place to be. Adam Tickell RGS Newsletter, December 2002 For most outsiders, an encounter with the discipline of geography may suggest that it studies everything, from global environmental change at one extreme to the minutiae of body-space at the other. It spans the physical, environmental and social sciences, and reaches into the humanities too. Nor might it look much like geography...
Getting Back Together or Splitting Up
Let us assume that human and physical geography are in some way divided. If so, there would appear to be at least three ways forward integration or perhaps re-integration splitting up or some kind of uneasy co-existence. What are the arguments in favour of re-uniting the two halves of geography, how might this best be achieved and are there any signs of this happening Three types of argument for re-unification have been presented in recent literature. The heritage argument claims that as...