Nature - autonomous learning

68 the ‘nature’ of geographyrepeatable investigative procedures as the best way to avoid bias andensure that reality can, as it were, ‘speak for itself’. For more onpositivist ideas in human geography see Johnston (1986: ch. 2) andin physical geography see Inkpen (2004). I will say more aboutscience in general in Chapter 4, en route to a discussion of physicalgeography’s scientific credentials.geomorphology’ argued strongly that physical geographers should measureand explain how processes defined by universal laws create specific sortsof landforms given a certain set of initial conditions.Together, Bagnold’s,Horton’s and Strahler’s works exposed the weaknesses of Davis’s imprecise,non-quantitative and ultimately speculative theories of landform evolutionand, by extension, of all earth-surface phenomena.They laid the groundworkfor a physical geography where explanations were derived from thetesting, by way of repeated observation and measurement, of refutablehypotheses. 1 This was an altogether more specialised, more rigorous, lessdescriptive approach to the physical environment than almost anythingfound in pre-1939 geography. It was aided by the development of newtechniques (like pollen analysis and aerial photography) for measuringenvironmental phenomena in the field or in the laboratory.Within a decadekey texts like Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology (Leopold et al. 1964) weremaking this new kind of physical geography a serious proposition.Mirroring this, the 1950s and 1960s saw human geography emergeas a distinct part of the discipline with its own subfields. The idea wasthat, like physical geography, it could survive vacating the integrativespace claimed by regionalism and human–environment studies by beinga locational science. It would describe, explain and maybe even predict thespatial patterning of the phenomena studied ageographically by economists,sociologists and political scientists. Economic and urban geography madegreat strides in this regard.Young Turks like Brian Berry,William Bunge andWilliam Garrison in the USA all insisted that there was a spatial order toeconomic and urban life and set about identifying it and the generalprocesses that brought it into existence. More generally, Peter Haggett’s(1965) landmark book Locational Analysis in Human Geography argued thatall the phenomena human geographers might wish to study – from