Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 105reasons why these fallacies are just that – fallacies – but two loom large.First, history shows us that what is taken to be truthful or acceptable knowledgeabout nature in the present may, in the future, be seen as profoundlyflawed. Second, since the early 1970s, a band of researchers called‘sociologists of scientific knowledge’ (SSK) have shown that scientists’research is never as objective or value-free as it appears. These SSKresearchers treat scientists rather as anthropologists treat a foreign ‘tribe’.They have shown, often in great empirical detail, that scientists ‘construct’their knowledges of nature (unwittingly for the most part) throughthe philosophical assumptions, theoretical choices and methodologicaldecisions they make. In geography, David Demeritt (1996) has applied SSKthinking to physical geographers’ research and, in so doing, arguably revealsthe constructedness of all knowledges of nature (see Chapter 4 for moreon SSK).In the remainder of this book I want to look at the main ways naturehas been studied by geographers in the past few years. In keeping witharguments made in Chapter 1, I want to focus on the knowledges of nature thatdifferent geographers produce – not on the ‘realities’ of the nature theseknowledges describe, explain or evaluate. What claims about nature aremade in these knowledges? What counts as ‘nature’ in these knowledges?What are the moral, aesthetic or practical consequences of these differentknowledge-claims? What agendas are served when students, professionalgeographers and other groups in society come to believe some or all of theseknowledges are ‘correct’, ‘valid’ or ‘true’? In posing these questionsI particularly want to challenge student readers to take geography – and, byimplication, other academic disciplines – off any pedestal it might occupyin their minds. Geography, it seems to me, is one of several domains ofknowledge-production that competes with other domains to persuadevarious audiences that nature is this not that, that it behaves in this way, notthat way, or that it’s moral and/or aesthetic standing is X, not Y and Z.Thiswas my argument in Chapter 1. In none of what follows do I want to denythat there are real things irreducible to knowledge: things that we describeusing the label ‘nature’, or one of its collateral terms. My point, though, isthat our comprehension of the ‘reality’ of those things is deeply conditionedby the sorts of knowledges about them we imbibe, digest and come toaccept as legitimate knowledge. In light of this, we need to recognise notonly that there’s a politics to knowledge (i.e. it’s rarely value-free), but thatthis knowledge also possesses a materiality that is as real as the physical