philosophy of geomorphology

Empiricism, positivism, critical rationalism, and realism have all been used as bases for geomorphology, and from the 1970s some geomorphologists have used stochastic and non-linear dynamics systems theory and chaos theory. Current thinking would seem to favour insights from quantum mechanics, which asserts that there is a limit to what is knowable (Heisenberg would not be surprised that an investigation of subglacial conditions will be influenced by the drilling of the borehole); that landscape change is best seen as dominated by uncertainties and probabilities; and that systems are entangled—they cannot be separated from their environments. Thus, geomorphology pays attention to the ‘way in which the real becomes contingent to form the actual’ (Lane, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26); it is place-dependent. There is a concentration on scale and emergence, and a distinction is made between time-bound and timeless processes.

Harrison and Durham (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23) suggest that an idealist geomorphology would shift academic attention ‘from the study of landforms and processes per se towards a more holistic exploration of the ways in which the researcher is inherently implicated within them’, signalling the ending of the concept of landscape as a pre-given entity which exists ‘out there’. For a useful interpretation of the changing paradigms in geomorphology, see Richards, Geography 87. See also R. J. Huggett, Area 34.