Reality, process, and the dialetical relation between man and environment

Reginald G. Golledge

pp. 109-120

in: Stephen Gale, Gunnar Olsson (eds), Philosophy in geography, Berlin, Springer, 1979

Abstract

An increasing desire for more complete levels of understanding of the relationship between man and environment led, in the later nineteen-sixties and early seventies, to a variety of research efforts focussing on the difference between form and process oriented approaches in human geography (e.g., Olsson (1969); Olsson and Gale (1968); King (1969); Golledge (1970); Olsson (1971) and Eichenbaum and Gale (1971)). Most of these papers discussed in some way the relative contribution of spatial form and spatial processes to our understanding of human behavior, and some specifically argued that more attention should be paid to human behavioral processes such as learning, perception, and attitude formation as part of the geographer's explanatory schema. Concurrently there existed a growing concern for discovering what man knew of the various environments in which he existed (Lynch, 1960; Gould, 1965; Golledge, Briggs, and Demko, 1969; Appleyard, 1970; Downs, 1970). This latter research began uncovering various properties of "known" environments that appeared to be somewhat different from the world of substance and fact which is experienced by our senses and which is usually described in terms of atomistic facts and mechanistic forces (Russell, 1918; Whitehead, 1933).

Cited authors

Russell Bertrand

Whitehead Alfred North