Nature - autonomous learning

the dis/unity of geography 199-Figure 4.4 Testing scientific hypotheses: the example of plate tectonics. Here basichypotheses are translated into empirically testable ones which, in turn, areassessed against various bodies of evidence. Reproduced from von Engelhardt,Zimmerman and Fischer (1988)this is grossly unfair. In practice, most physical geographers see theknowledge they produce as provisionally true not absolutely so: as the bestavailable representation of how the biophysical world operates. This isconcordant with the well-known idea that science is ‘organised scepticism’:a consistent procedure for testing, amending and improving existingknowledge about the material world. Finally, it is wrong to assume that allphysical geographers adhere to a ‘mimetic’ or ‘correspondence’ view ofknowledge.This view, as I noted earlier, assumes that scientific knowledgereflects reality as in a mirror. It thus sidesteps the idea that knowledge is afilter that strains and sieves out sense-data such that we can never knowreality ‘as it really is’ (an idea I discussed at length in Chapter 1). But somephysical geographers operate with coherence and utilitarian (or instrumentalist)views of the knowledge their research produces.The former is the view thatknowledge of reality is likely to be correct if it is consistent with existing