Nature - autonomous learning

182 the dis/unity of geographyit is the rigour with which these steps are followed that gives physicalgeographers confidence that the knowledge they produce is realisticrather than false. As Schumm (1991: 26) put it, ‘method is only aspowerful as the objectivity of the individual using it’.geographers, and there have been fewer still since. In the main, physicalgeographers prefer to ‘do’ rather than to philosophise about the mannerof their doings. For them, the scientific nature of their research is manifestprecisely in its execution. In other words, physical geographers have notposited an ideal model of Science (with a capital S) to which their researchshould conform.Though they have drawn inspiration from philosophersand historians of science, they have not mechanically adhered to receivednotions of how ‘proper scientific research’ should proceed.The reason for this, in part, is that many of these notions have beenderived from laboratory science. Yet most physical geographers wouldcharacterise themselves as field scientists (Phillips 1999: 482). Unlikelaboratory scientists, field scientists investigate the non-human world in‘live’ rather than ‘artificial’ settings. 3 Field sciences are typically ‘composite’disciplines whose aim is synthesis.They combine knowledge from othersciences and apply it to an understanding of complex and often dynamicenvironments that are not readily amenable to experimental control.Thus,physical geography draws upon physics, chemistry, mathematics andbiology to aid its understanding of biophysical reality. But this does notmake it a purely derivative discipline, reliant on others for knowledge andunderstanding.The distinctiveness and originality of physical geographyis that it seeks to understand how the phenomena studied in relativeisolation by other natural sciences come together in specific spatio-temporalcontexts. As Ken Gregory (2000: 9) put it in his well-known definition:‘Physical geography focuses upon the character of, and processes shaping,the land-surface of the earth and its envelope, emphasizing the spatialvariations . . . and temporal changes necessary to understand the . . .environments of the earth . . .’. Like earth science and environmentalscience, physical geography ‘is concerned with phenomena with manyinteracting parts’ (Malanson 1999: 747). For instance, a fluvial geomorphologiststudying gravel-bed rivers needs to understand the relationships