Nature - autonomous learning

the dis/unity of geography 221geography professors is truthful and accurate. In light of what you’velearnt in this chapter, how many of these reasons do you think standup to close scrutiny?• List some of dangers that arise if we apply the nature-sceptical sensibilitiesof many human geographers to the environmental knowledgesproduced by physical geographers.FURTHER READINGTwo excellent introductions to science have been written by Woolgar(1988) and Sardar and van Loon (2002). Good primers on the philosophyand methods of science are provided by Chalmers (1990) and Okasha(2002). Despite its focus on social science, Smith’s (2002) book offers luciddiscussions of many of the issues covered in this chapter. Kukla (2000)confronts the social constructivist challenge to scientific realism headon. In physical geography, the best general texts on scientific method areHaines-Young and Petch (1986), Inkpen (2004: chs 1-5) and Schumm(1991), while Marshall (1985) offers a good account of scientific methodfor geographers more generally. Rhoads and Thorn (1994) set thesemethodological debates in a wider intellectual context.The overlappingontological and epistemological debates discussed in this chapter are welldiscussed by Burt (2005), Inkpen (2004: ch. 7), Lane (2001), Phillips(1999), and Thorne (2003).These debates have also come to the fore inresponses to papers by Massey (1999) and Harrison and Dunham (1998)– see the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1999 [24] 2; and 2001[26] 2). A debate on method in physical geography in the Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers (Bauer 1999) is also worth referring to.In a sense, the ontological and epistemological debates current inphysical geography indicate that the non-human world is a ‘problem’for the discipline. Another indication of this problem is the splinteredcharacter of physical geography – a result of the fact that specialisationhas been deemed necessary in order to understand the huge rangeof environmental phenomena that physical geographers confront.Againstthis, some have argued that global environmental problems offer anopportunity for physical geographers to focus again on interconnectionsbetween the atmo-, pedo-, hydro-, cryo- and biospheres. See Gregoryet al. (2002), Gregory (2004) and Slaymaker and Spencer (1998: ch. 1) forviewpoints.