Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 67Box 2.2 GEOGRAPHY AS A SCIENCEThe attempt of Schaefer and others to make geography a ‘spatialscience’ after the Second World War can convey the false impressionthat pre-war geography considered itself to be ‘unscientific’. In reality,the founders of anglophone university geography (like Mackinder)certainly saw the subject as a science, as did Schaefer’s erstwhileopponent, Richard Hartshorne. This begs the question: what isscience? There is no single nor correct answer to this question. Forinstance, the Oxford English Dictionary offers four main definitions ofthe term. In the late Victorian period, anglophone geography’sfounders were arguably working with a very generic understandingof science. They saw it as an attempt to understand the worldthrough systematic observation of the human and non-humanworlds. In this sense, they distinguished science from opinion,religion, metaphysics, dogma and mysticism. Science, for them, wasevidence-based knowledge and, as such, was a potentially objectivereflection of reality: that is, about facts not fiction. However, duringthe early twentieth century, most geographers rarely got beyond thisvery general, rather ‘thin’ conception of what made science differentfrom other human practices and scientific knowledge different fromother ways of knowing. Schaefer’s paper and the subsequent effortsof Bunge (1962), David Harvey (1969) and other ‘spatial scientists’were attempts to offer a more specific or ‘thick’ conception ofscience. According to some this conception was ‘positivist’ or ‘logicalpositivist’. I do not have the space to explain these two conceptionsof science here, but I can make some general points. First, both takeit as axiomatic that a material world exists independently ofthe investigator (the postulate of ‘ontological realism’) andthat scientific knowledge can accurately mirror that world if appropriateprocedures are followed (the postulate of ‘epistemologicalrealism’). Second, both argue that the material world can act asa ‘court of appeal’ to adjudicate between rival interpretations of itstrue nature. Using our senses and various instruments, bothmaintain that we can ascertain empirical truths ‘out there’ in theworld. Finally, both notions of science regard the use of systematic,