GEOG 2075 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Kurt Schaefer, Thomas Griffith Taylor, Paradigm Shift
6 Jan 2020
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Geography Textbook Notes 6
Geography as a science: a new research agenda
The then-established views regarding the nature of geography were set out in two large
volumes in the early 1950s: Geography in the Twentieth Century (1951), edited by Griffith
Taylor, and American Geography: Inventory and Prospect (1954), edited by Preston James and
Clarence Jones. However, by then there was growing unease in North America and the United
Kingdom with the dominant orientation of the discipline. It was seen as overemphasizing
vertical (or society-environment) relationships and largely ignoring the horizontal (or spatial)
relationships that characterized societies in which movement and exchange were so important.
Geographers, it was argued, should pay more attention to spatial organization of economic,
social, and political activities across the environmental backdrops. Too much effort was spent,
as George Kimble expressed it,
drawing boundaries that don't exist around areas that don't matter…from the air it is the links
in the landscape that impress the observer, not the boundaries.
Studies of areal functional organization were inaugurated, both for their intrinsic interest and
because of their value; one pioneer, Robert Dickinson, argued that functional regions around
towns and cities should be used to define regional and local government areas.
There was also a growing belief that the methods for defining regions were out of line with the
scientific approaches characterizing other disciplines. Some felt that geographers had not
contributed well to the war effort: Edward A. Ackerman, a professor of geography at the
University of Chicago from 1948 to 1955 (and later head of the Carnegie Foundation), claimed
that those working in the U.S. government's intelligence service had only a weak understanding
of their material and portrayed them as "more or less amateurs in the subjects on which they
published." He argued that geographers should follow not only the natural sciences but also
most of the social sciences and should adopt more-rigorous research procedures.
Although there were moves in those directions in a number of places, the arguments were
focused in 1953 by a paper in the prestigious Annals of the Association of American
Geographers that strongly criticized what Ackerman called the "Hartshornian [i.e., regional]
orthodoxy." Kurt Schaefer, a German-trained geographer at the University of Iowa, argued that
science is characterized by its explanations. These involve laws, or generalized statements of
observed regularities, that identify cause-and-effect relationships. According to Schaefer, "to
explain the phenomena one has described means always to recognize them as instances of
laws"; for him the major regularities that geographers study relate to spatial patterns (the
horizontal relationships identified above), and so "geography has to be conceived as the science
Document Summary
Geography as a science: a new research agenda. The then-established views regarding the nature of geography were set out in two large volumes in the early 1950s: geography in the twentieth century (1951), edited by griffith. Taylor, and american geography: inventory and prospect (1954), edited by preston james and. However, by then there was growing unease in north america and the united. Kingdom with the dominant orientation of the discipline. It was seen as overemphasizing vertical (or society-environment) relationships and largely ignoring the horizontal (or spatial) relationships that characterized societies in which movement and exchange were so important. Geographers, it was argued, should pay more attention to spatial organization of economic, social, and political activities across the environmental backdrops. Too much effort was spent, as george kimble expressed it, drawing boundaries that don"t exist around areas that don"t matter from the air it is the links in the landscape that impress the observer, not the boundaries.
