Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 69migration to transportation – have a non-random spatial configuration thatcan be explained in terms of a few key principles or processes. In this questto be a distinct branch of the discipline, human geography in the USAwas much more successful than its physical counterpart, which neverquite escaped the clutches of geology departments. In the UK andCommonwealth countries, though, both human and physical geographyboomed during the 1950s and 1960s – years when governments investedheavily in their universities.Though the differences between human and physical geographyhardened through the 1960s, this did not, initially at least, mean thatgeography was a divided discipline. Despite the obvious differences insubject matter, human and physical geography could claim to have thefollowing key things in common. First, there was the joint commitmentto describing and explaining the spatial distribution and spatial patterningof things on the surface of the earth at various scales – from why so manyriver-tributary systems are dendritic to why migration volumes declinewith distance from the migrants’ source area. Second, both human andphysical geography employed a similar investigative procedure, namely thedeductive-nomological procedure (or what was known as ‘the scientificmethod’).This procedure, however loosely followed in practice, 2 ensuredthat whatever their subject matter, all aspiring scientific geographers wouldinvestigate reality in a similar way. As David Harvey explained in hismethodological treatise Explanation in Geography (1969), the scientific methodentailed the following steps.To begin with, a researcher would carefullyobserve a portion of reality that interested them and would then seek toexplain what they saw in terms of clearly articulated hypotheses. Thesehypotheses would then be tested to see if they were confirmed by numerousattempts to verify and/or falsify them empirically. In turn, once theempirical evidence was sufficiently voluminous, a theory or law would bederived from the now-substantiated hypotheses that would apply to allother instances of the phenomena they covered not yet studied.This meantthat, in future cases, one might predict a set of events given one’s faith inthe law or theory and enough local knowledge about the specifics (or ‘initialconditions’) of the case in question. 3 This mention of laws and theoriesbrings us to the third thing human and physical geography had in commonduring the 1950s and 1960s: namely, a commitment to discovering lawsand developing theories (and also models) that were of a wide applicabilitywithin various sub-disciplinary areas. In economic geography these