Nature - autonomous learning

180 the dis/unity of geographyENVIRONMENTAL REALISM: AGENDAS ANDJUSTIFICATIONSPhysical geographers rarely reflect, in any formal way, on what makestheir field of study a ‘science’.Yet it is surely no accident that they use theappellation to describe their research. Science is a highly loaded word.The key to its power is that it’s uniquely associated with the ideals oftruth, objectivity and accuracy (Box 4.1).As Alan Chalmers (1999: 1) putit in his book What Is This Thing Called Science?,‘scientific knowledge is [seen as]proven knowledge’.This echoes the view of the influential philosopherof science Karl Popper:‘science is one of the few human activities – perhapsthe only one – in which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often,in time, corrected. In most other fields of human endeavour there is change,but rarely progress’ (Popper 1974: 216–17).The word ‘science’ does notsimply describe a set of investigative procedures that anyone who wishesto be a scientist should adopt if they are to produce accurate knowledgeabout a given phenomena. More pointedly, it is also a rhetorical weapon.As I explained in Chapter 2, geography as a whole began to self-consciouslycharacterise itself as a science from the 1950s in response to pressuresemanating from outside the discipline and as a means of effecting intellectualchange within the discipline. Though the term had been usedto describe geography since the discipline’s inception, it took on a moresubstantive meaning from the mid-twentieth century. I will say more aboutthat substantive meaning later. For now I simply note that the appellation‘science’ served political as much as intellectual purposes (Castree 2004a).In the case of physical geography, not only did it permit criticism of previouslydominant research approaches (like W. M. Davis’s rather speculativeideas about landform evolution). It also allowed physical geographers toalign their research with ‘prestige’ disciplines like physics, chemistry andbiology and so boost their image within and outside geography.More than five decades on, most physical geographers describe themselvesas scientists as a matter of course.The scientific status of their researchis simply taken for granted.This might suggest that physical geographersactively and frequently discuss what is ‘scientific’ about their modeof interrogating the world. But in reality such discussion is rare. Bothprior to and between texts like Physical Geography:Its Nature and Methods (Haines-Young and Petch 1986) and The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology (Rhoads andThorn 1996) there were few formal discussions of science by physical