Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and while their interests as geographers span both the social and the environmental,
one has worked in recent years more on the social side (Goodchild), and one on the
environmental side (Gong). Thus the chapter presents two distinct perspectives, and
ranges in content from the abstract issues of scientific method to the practical issues
of data collection and sharing.
The next two sections present the US and Chinese perspectives. These are then
followed by a brief conclusion.
2.2
A US Perspective
2.2.1
Methodological Perspectives
Science has long given greatest importance to discoveries that apply everywhere, at
all times. In mathematics, physics, and chemistry, for example, it would be absurd
to announce a discovery that was only valid on certain days of the week, in certain
countries or places. Newton's laws of motion, Einstein's principles of special and
general relativity, and Mendeleev's periodic table are all believed to be entirely
independent of space and time.
The social and environmental sciences also inherited this perspective, though
there has been almost continuous debate about its merits throughout their history.
In economics, for example, a strong predilection for theory emerged in a discipline
that showed little interest in how the principles of economic behavior might vary
through time, and between different areas of the Earth's surface. The expression of
economic principles might vary, of course, because of varying conditions, but the
principles themselves should remain constant. In biology, Darwin's observations of
finches in the Galapagos Islands led to a unified and universal principle of natural
selection, rather than to a science based on detailed description of spatial or temporal
variations.
In the United States, the discipline of geography has long struggled with these
issues. The nomothetic argument holds that geography should be concerned with
discovering principles that apply everywhere and at all times in the domain of
geography, that is, the surface and near-surface of the Earth (see, for example, Bunge
1966 ). In the late 1950s it appeared that such principles might indeed be found, and
great interest was expressed in apparent empirical regularities such as Zipf's rank-
size rule and Horton's laws of stream number. Arguments grounded in economics
led to the regularities predicted by Christaller and Lösch for patterns of settlement,
and by von Thünen for patterns of land use. The spatial interaction model predicted
a regular decline of interaction with distance. But many of these regularities turned
out to be no more than the most likely outcome of random processes (Goodchild
1992 ), and the regularities predicted by Christaller and others turned out to be far too
occluded by noise to be observable in any but the weakest forms (Goodchild 1969 ).
Many US geographers were unconvinced by the nomothetic arguments, pre-
ferring a discipline that focused on documenting the unique properties of places,
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