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Paradigms Geographical Thought

Geography (University of Delhi)

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PARADIGMS IN GEOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION: -

Any model, idea, concept, technique or method that is capable of generating

scholarly concern or research in a particular time period maybe called a
"Paradigm". Paradigms focus on the philosophical perspectives and
methodologies that have been in vogue and which continue to provide the
theoretical feedback for the new researches.

Paradigm is useful in the formation of- Philosophical concept, theory and

methodology.

The term ‘Paradigm’ was first used by the US science theorist and historian
Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolution”. His book
"The Structure of scientific revolutions" (1962) presented the idea that
science undergoes Periodic Revolutions which he calls "Paradigm shifts".

He defines paradigms as ‘Universally recognized scientific achievements

that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of
practitioners’.

In the second edition of his book, Kuhn (1970a) argued that the most basic
function of a paradigm is as an exemplar: a concrete problem solution within
a discipline that serves as a model for successive scientists. Generally, such
exemplars tie a scientific theory together, serving as an example of a
successful and striking application. Paradigms (in the sense of ‘exemplars’)
will guide research as they are presented to students as models the students
should try to copy.

The other meaning of paradigm put forward by Kuhn is as a disciplinary

matrix – ‘the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on
shared by the members of a given community’. A disciplinary matrix may be
shared by a large group of members of a discipline while, at the same time,

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each member is working with different ‘exemplars’ in his or her everyday

research. It is in the sense of a disciplinary matrix that the term ‘paradigm’
has most commonly been applied to geography

Bird (1977) has argued that Kuhn has been the most influential scientific
methodologist as far as geography is concerned. Mair (1986) suggests that
geographers influenced by Kuhn fall into two groups. First there are those
who have used Kuhn to legitimize their propaganda for a ‘paradigm change’
within the discipline and as a weapon against the scientific ‘establishment’.
Second, several geographical historiographers have tried to apply a Kuhnian
model to the development of geographical thought. The paradigm concept
has taken on a life of its own beyond that originally envisaged by Kuhn, and
as such has been regarded as a useful ‘exemplar’ (model or teaching
framework) for histories of geography. To explain the process of
development of Science Kuhn prepared a model called "Paradigm of
science".

PARADIGMS IN GEOGRAPHY: -

Geography confronted many evolutionary and methodological problems. We

have the following major paradigms in geography: -

(1) Teleological Descriptive paradigm:

Ritter’s teleological approach is generally taken to mean that a phenomenon

is explained in relation to the purpose it is believed to serve. The ‘holistic-
synthesis’ of organic relationships is strongly related to teleological
explanatory models. This approach is reflected in most of the semantic
religions and their philosophies.

Being a teleologist, Ritter asserted that all phenomena are spatially

distributed according to the plan of God for mankind. The major problem of
the teleological philosophy is that such a philosophy cannot be tested
empirically and therefore does not qualify as scientific explanation.

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(2) Deterministic Paradigm:

Darwin laid the foundation of the deterministic approach in geography. In

his opinion, the natural conditions determine the socio-cultural
development of a society. It was especially after Darwin that scientists were
looking for the governing laws of nature (and the materially conditioned
social laws) and to a considerable extent adopted a nomothetic or law-
making approach.

It was largely from the Darwinian tradition that Fredrich Ratzel led the
subject into the first phase of professionalism, and then the ‘deterministic
school’ founded by him represented the first paradigm phase in geography.

Friedrich Ratzel explored the influences of physical environment on

mankind. In Anthropogeographie (volumes I) and political geography (1897),
his major contributions, accelerated human geography systematically and
from Darwin's point of view. Ratzel saw man as the end product of
evolution.

Philosophy of determinism is based upon the interaction between primitive

human society and strong forces of nature. According to determinist, Man is
a passive agent, and nature is an active agent, which controls and determine
the action and decision-making processes of man. And the human actions
can be explained as a response to the natural environment.

Semple in her book ‘Influence of Geographical Environment’ considered

dominance of nature over man. Man, according to her, is a product of the
Earth’s surface and he is the plastic moduled by nature according to the
natural environment.

William Morris Davis was a critic of human geographers. He developed the

Theory of Cycle of Erosion which he defined as geomorphological cycle. He
was of the opinion that human geographers “fail to become all-round
geographers” and that their studies are unbalanced and lack homologous

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treatment as they have less concern with the chronology of existing

landforms than with the features of existing surfaces.

Ellsworth Huntington tried to explain the styles of life of human groups and
nations in the light of their weather and climatic conditions. In his book
‘Civilisation and Climate’, he asserted that civilization could develop only in
regions of stimulating weather.

In the terminology of Kuhn, geomorphology and determinism represented

the first paradigm phase in geography

In human geography, determinism was challenged by possibilism and the

French school of regional geographers. These geographers were trained to
concentrate their study on the unique single region. The appropriate
methodology under this idiographic approach would be to try to understand
a society and its habitat through local fieldwork which was regarded as of
the utmost importance. Vidal de la Blache based his Tableau de la
Géographie de la France (1903) on studies in each département.

(3) Possibilistic Paradigm

Vidal de La Blache and his followers laid stress on possibilism and declared
that man is not a passive agent ruled by the forces of nature which play their
role and determine man’s destiny and shape human society.

The possibilist paradigm presented a model of man perceiving the range of

alternative uses to which he could put an environment and selecting that
which best fitted his cultural dispositions.

According to possibilists, it is man who is the primary architect of his

environment. They opined that environment contains a number of
possibilities and their utilization is dependent entirely on human selection.
In order to use this possibility, they make two types of adjustments with the
environment, i.e., in the form of adaptation and modification.

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Essence of possibilism is that:

 Nature provides possibilities and man utilize them according to his

culture, traditions and levels of socio-economic development.

 Nature is never more than an adviser.

 There are not necessities but everywhere possibilities. The range of

possibilities in every region is limited more by the price man is willing
to pay off what he wants than by the dictates of environment. For
example, man through his technical skill can grow banana, rice and
other plants in tundra, Greenland and Antarctica but he has to take
into consideration the input cost.

Second quarter of the 20th century was devoted to research in human and
regional geography. In Geography occurred a sociological trend put forward
by writings of Vidal De la Blache, Lucien Febvre and Jean Brunhes in France
and Isaiah Bowman and H.H Barrows in United States.

According to Febvre “Man is not a passive being but an active force”. He

stated that a homogeneous region did not necessarily produce, for all time, a
homogeneous society. The inhabitants of any region were able to choose
from time to time and in quantity they desired, some of the benefits and
chances for benefit which the region possessed. However, the number of
choices or opportunities for choice was not infinite in each region; each
region had an upper limit.

Vidal de la Blache asserted “Nature sets limits and offer possibilities for
human settlement, but the way man reacts or adjusts to theses conditions
depends on his own traditional way of life’. He meant to say that the physical
environment provides a range of possibilities which man turned to his use
according to his needs, wishes and capacities, in creating his habitat. Blache
emphasized the concept of a way of living (genre de vie) in supporting the
philosophy of possibilism. The ‘genre de vie’ refers to the inherited traits
that members of a human community learn- what may be called a culture.

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Jean Brunhes believed ‘Nature is not mandatory but permissive’. According

to Brunhes, limits set by nature to man’s action vary from place to place on
the Earth’s surface and from one historical period to other. In the more
favorable areas of the warm and cool temperate zones and in periods when
man’s techniques are highly developed, the possibilities are numerous.

Barrows, the prominent ecologist, gave greater importance to man than to

environment. He was the founder of the concept of ‘human ecology’ or the
adjustment of man to his natural environment. He emphasized that human
ecology should be used for the study of man and environment, not in a
deterministic sense, but for man’s place in the ‘web of life’ or the ‘economy
of nature’.

This approach has been criticized on several accounts. For example, despite
numerous possibilities, man has not been able to get rid of the obstacles set
by the physical forces. The possibilities may be many in temperate regions
but limited in the desert, equatorial, tundra and high mountainous region.

(4) Landscape paradigm

Sauer’s Landscape Paradigm focusses on the on going processes leading to

landscape change up to and including the present and the beginning at the
pre-human stage of occupance.

Carl O. Sauer in his article ‘The Morphology of Landscape’ coined the

concept of cultural landscape. The landscape approach described the
interrelation period between humans and environment, primarily
emphasizing human impacts on environment. He attempted to represent
geography as a science that finds its entire field in the landscape. Its concern
is to establish the connection of phenomena in the visible landscape and the
connections are the ones of spatial association and not of hidden causality.

Otto Schluter in 1906 applied the term ‘Landschaftskunde’ (landscape

science) to designate the concept of geography. He objected to the
chorological definition of geography and noted that accepting the landscape

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as the subject matter of geography would give the field a logical definition.
He also insisted that geographers should consider and emphasize the form
and spatial structure created by visible phenomena on the surface of the
earth as their unifying theme.

Seigfried Passarge believed that cultural geography is concerned with the

influence of humankind and its works in the creation of the cultural
landscape or the man-made landscape. Passarge analyzed the impact of
landscape on the psychology of the human occupants. His first major work
‘Grundlagen der Landschaftskunde’ published in four volumes deals with the
elements of landscape, the causes of the landscape phenomena, the origin
of landforms and the imprint of Human’s work on the landscape.

(5) Regional Paradigm

After the Vidalian tradition, the major concern of geographers became to

study regions. George Chabot went to the extent of saying that “regional
geography is the center around which everything converges”. Regional
geography flourished in France and got diffused in the neighboring
countries. But, later on, this approach also became inadequate to explain
the regional personality, and therefore, a period of crisis in the discipline
emerged. It brought about quantitative revolution and functional approach
in geography.

The main focus of the paradigm was on areal differentiation, on the very
character of the earth’s surface especially of the inhabited parts.

The term ‘Areal differentiation’ was coined by Richard Hartshorne in his

work ‘Nature of Geography’ in 1939. The term signifies the areal variation of
both physical and human phenomena on the earth’s surface. Th aerial study
may be constructed as traditional regional geography or chorology.

The regional paradigm flourished in France, Great Britain and the United
States. Richard Hartshorne’s name is associated with the regional paradigm.

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Alfred Hettner claimed that geography is an idiographic (regional) rather

than nomothetic (general). He rejected the view that geography could be
either general or regional geography. He wrote the following books on
regional geography: Fundamentals of Regional Geography and Comparative
Regional Geography.

Both Hettner and Hartshorne considered region to be a functional unit-an

organism which was more than the sum of its parts. Functionalism affected
much geographical research in the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth centuries.

By the 1950s, disillusionment with the empiricist philosophy was growing

and slowly the topical specialisms came to greater dominance and gradually
the regional paradigm lost much of its earlier acceptability.

(6) Spatial Paradigm

Schaefer, with his spatial organization paradigm initiated what may be called
the quantitative and theoretical revolution in geography. His paper
“Exceptionalism in Geography” became a rallying point for the large crop of
young geographers who were feeling greatly dissatisfied with the ’sterile’
regional paradigm of geography as chorology. He put forward a strong case
for geography to adopt the philosophy and methodology of scientific
positivism. He claimed that in geography the major regularities refer to
spatial patterns and hence, geography should be conceived as the science
concerned with the formulation of laws governing the spatial distribution of
certain features on the surface of earth. He regarded identification of laws
about patterns of spatial relationship as the raison d’etre if geography.

The major advances towards a unifying methodological and philosophical

basis of the quantitative school were made in the 1960s by British
geographers, Peter Haggett, Richard Chorley and David Harvey. These
scholars suggested that geography should adopt quantitative methods and

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use of computer to handle data to develop geographical paradigms and

models.

William Bunge (American Geographer) made major contributions to

quantitative spatial analysis earlier in his career. His cartographic
representations of spatial patterns, particularly in theoretical geography,
were also innovative

Quantitative Revolution in simpler terms can be defined as the diffusion of

mathematical and statistical techniques in geography to make the subject
and theories more precise. It is after the quantitative revolution that
geographers started concentrating more on field studies generating primary
data, utilizing secondary data and applying the sampling techniques.

(7) Positivism Paradigm

Positivism is a philosophical viewpoint that limits the knowledge to the facts

that can be observed and to the relationships between these facts. It is also
called Empiricism.

The essence of positivist philosophy is that ideally speaking is a value free,

neutral, impartial and objective. The concept of positivism emerged after the
French Revolution and was established by Auguste Comte who attempted to
distinguish science from metaphysics and religion. Positivism began as a
polemical weapon against the ‘negative philosophy’ prevalent before the
revolution.

The philosophy of positivism which is also known as the hypothetic-

deductive explanation of a kind of controlled speculation. It led to
development of a model building theoretical science because it deals with
quantifiable phenomena which seem to have known situation in time and
space.

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(8) Behavioural Paradigm

It is an approach to human geography and in particular to the processes

responsible for human spatial behavior which especially draws on
behaviouralism as a key to understanding human spatial behaviour.

The Behavioural approach has been adopted since the time of Immanuel
Kant. In 1947, Wright put emphasis on Behavioural approach for the
interpretation of man-nature interaction. Kirk supplied one of the first
Behavioural models. In his model, he asserted that in space and time the
same information would have different meaning for people of different
socio-economic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a similar
geographical environment. Each individual of a society reacts differently to a
piece of information about the resource, space and environment.

Dissatisfaction with the progress of ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography led

to the development of Behavioural approach in geography.

Behavioural geography seeks to identify how different individuals responds

to particular stimuli and also how the same individuals respond to the same
stimulus in different situations. It focuses on the perceived environment.

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