Nature - autonomous learning

88 the ‘nature’ of geographysocial and environmental life, they argued, was not empirically observablebut lay, rather, at the ontological level.The same causal powers could havedifferent real-world effects depending on the context. In part, this is becauseof ‘emergent effects’ caused by the combination of two or more separatecausal powers. What is more, because causal powers are not themselvesvisible their existence can only be inferred from observing these overdeterminedeffects. This called into question the common belief, onethat geography’s spatial scientists had often adhered to, that the goal ofscientific research is the identification of visible correspondences orpatterns. For transcendental realists, the true aim of all research is to identifythe enduring causal powers of things en route to an understanding oftheir contingent interactions in any situation, leading to equally contingentempirical outcomes.Transcendental realism was introduced into geography by Andrew Sayer.His Method in Social Science (1984) explained realist ideas for humangeographers. It helped consolidate the move away from spatial science inthis half of the discipline and was sufficiently encompassing that Marxists,feminists and other human geographers could draw upon it. But thebook also emphasised the ontological differences between the human worldand the natural environment that was part of Bhaskar and Harre’s philosophy.Thesedifferences included the fact that people are interpretativebeings (unlike, say, trees) with a capacity to both reflect on and alter thesocial contexts in which their lives are lived – the point humanisticgeographers had made from the early 1970s. Sayer’s emphasis upon theimplications of transcendental realism for social research no doubt allowedmany physical geographers to ignore it until much later (in the 1990s),by which time human geographers had moved on to other intellectualpastures. Another possible reason why human and physical geographydid not rally around transcendental realism is that physical geography’sempirical, case-study, fieldwork emphasis made philosophical discussionless common than in human geography.Whatever the reason, late 1980s human geography made virtuallyno reference to the environment, let alone notions of human nature, inany of its constituent parts. Theoretically, Marxism, feminism and theleft-wing parts of humanistic geography paved the way for a ‘critical humangeography’ that sought not only to explain the social world but to change italso.Topically, human geography was dominated by its economic, socialand urban branches, with political geography growing in importance,