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the dis/unity of geography 187the next section), it remains the case that that this knowledge is not purelyself-referential. Instead, it is always about something other than itself: namely, aworld that exists separately from it. If this were not the case then researcherswould have nothing to research! And since that world cannot be easilyaltered, let alone constructed (e.g. most people would agree that one cannot‘construct’ the river Nile, only representations of it), it follows forrealists that their knowledge is always more than a groundless fabrication.Thisknowledge has real referents that condition and constrain howthose referents are represented by researchers (for a lucid introductionto the relativism–realism debate in science see Kirk 1999 and Okasha 2002:ch. 4).THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFICKNOWLEDGEBefore I discuss the investigative procedures that, broadly speaking,give physical geographers confidence in the realism (in sense (ii) above)of the knowledge they produce, I want to explore the possibility that thisconfidence is misplaced. I mentioned above that physical geographers haverarely felt compelled to defend their methods of environmental investigationin any formal sense. For the most part, they take it as given thatphysical geography is a science, leaving room only for a debate over whatkind of science it happens to be (as we’ll see in the next two sections).Thisis odd for two reasons. First, over the past two decades, a field of study calledthe sociology of scientific knowledge (or SSK) – sometimes known moregenerally as science and technology studies (STS) – has questioned theobjectivity of scientists’ findings. Examining the activities of a whole rangeof different scientists operating in different disciplines and institutions, 6SSK researchers have suggested that even ‘scientific knowledge is made up,just like fairy tales and nursery rhymes’ (Demeritt 1996: 484). SSK has beencentral to the so-called ‘science wars’ to which I referred in the Preface and,in the eyes of its detractors (e.g. Gross and Levitt 1994), is ‘anti-science’.Second, the image of scientific knowledge has been tainted in recent yearsby a series of public-health scares – like avian flu and BSE.As I observed inChapter 1, scientists’ unawareness of, or uncertainty about, these manufacturedhazards have shaken public faith in their expertise. Given this twincontext, one might have expected physical geographers to launch a defenceof the scientificity of their research.Yet, as I’ve said, the reality is that these