Nature - autonomous learning

the dis/unity of geography 183between (i) water volume, speed and turbulence, (ii) the character of bedgravel (iii) the nature of aquatic flora and fauna (iv) sediment load, and(v) the erosivity of river-bank material (among other things). Because riversare ‘open systems’, these relationships cannot be studied in the sameway as a laboratory scientist studies a ‘closed system’ – one where thevariables of interest can be isolated and held constant. In sum, and tosimplify somewhat, physical geography’s niche within the sciences liesin its aspiration to produce accurate knowledge of the interactions thatgive the non-human world its particular character at particular spatial andtemporal scales. 4In light of the above discussion, it’s clear that geography is a divideddiscipline when it comes to knowledges of nature.As explained in the previouschapter, those human geographers who study nature are concernedwith the ways things so named are understood and materially altered bypeople.Though they claim that their knowledge of what we call nature isaccurate (while being sceptical of other people’s), they mostly prefer notto characterise their methods or their findings as ‘scientific’.The reasons forthem rejecting the appellation ‘science’ are complex, but among them isthe fact that human geography is currently too intellectually diverse forthis label to serve as an adequate descriptor (see Demeritt 1996: 486–90).By contrast, physical geographers are interested in the non-human worldin and of itself – rather than in how that world is understood by societyor in the social practices and forces altering the character of that world.As Urban and Rhoads (2003: 224) express it, ‘The domain of physicalgeography is the biophysical world. If humans are considered it is only theeffect of [their] activity . . . not the motivations behind the effects’. Physicalgeographers see their research as scientific in the double sense that (i) it isabout a really existing non-human world whose operations are absolutelyor relatively autonomous from society, and (ii) that it actually or potentiallyrepresents that world as it really is. As Bruce Rhoads (1999: 765) puts itin relation to (i), quoting the philosopher Ian Hacking (1996: 44), ‘Atthe most fundamental level . . . physical geographers . . . subscribe to thegeneral . . . sentiment that “there is one world susceptible of scientificinvestigation, one reality amenable to scientific description, [and] onetotality of truths equally open to scientific inquirers . . .” ’. In relation to(ii) we can observe that some version of the so-called ‘correspondencetheory of truth’ is involved, wherein scientific knowledge is seen to ‘mirror’the biophysical world.We might also note that physical geographers are