General theories and principles in geography and GIScience: Moving beyond the idiographic and nomothetic dichotomy

Abstract

opics related to the nature of geographic knowledge and the pathway to acquire geographic knowledge have been debated and contested especially during periods of major social and technological change (Harvey 1969; Sayer 1984; Liverman et al. 1998; Sui and Kedron 2021). Tied to these changes has been an oscillation between focuses on phenomenal (declarative) vs. intellectual (primed by cognitive demands) nature of geographic knowledge. Shifting interests in specialities, often triggered by technical innovations in representation and analysis, have constantly changed our views on what is considered as geographic knowledge and challenged our approaches to produce it (Golledge 2002). What remains unchanged is geographers’ continued quest to advance geographic vocabulary, define and examine geographic concepts, and develop spatially explicit theories relating to human, physical environments and their complex interactions. Explorations of interactions between these domains has generated a new interest in advancing general principles and analytical frameworks in geography. Geography is a discipline with a diversity of subfields, including cartography and GIScience as well as human, physical and nature-and-society geography. Despite the enduring debate on whether geography should be an idiographic (aiming to produce phenomenal/declarative knowledge) vs. nomothetic (aiming to develop general principles and theories) discipline, geography has witnessed dramatic specialization within its subfields over the past two decades. This specialization might enable scholars to develop indepth understandings and techniques that better address the issues faced in respective subfields under particular contexts or conditions. These specializations may lead to topical overlap with scholars from other disciplines with whom they still differ by their geographical imagination and approach. Thus, there is a need for geographers to articulate general principles and analytical frameworks that are held in common across the diverse subfields in geography to both better articulate what is common to geography and how it is different from other disciplines and approaches (Sui 2004; Goodchild 2004; Anselin and Li 2020). An important body of work exploring this question, with a focus on spatial relationships, has been produced in the GIScience subfield (http://gistbok.ucgis. org), broadly defined. These treatments have focussed on principles related to spatial variation of phenomena. Spatial autocorrelation (‘Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’) and spatial heterogeneity (‘Geographic variables exhibit uncontrolled variance’) are two important general principles (commonly referred to as first and second laws of geography by some authors), that geographers have offered as important analytical frames for geographic analyses. Recently, a possible third principle, geographic similarity (‘The more similar geographic configurations of two points, the more similar the values (processes) of the target variable at these two points’), was proposed as another general analytical frame. It, in combination with the previous two, opens up new avenues of engagement with ongoing debates about issues such as scale, place, relation, context, and integration within various subfields of both geography and GIscience. A number of questions are raised when considering these principles/laws: 1) Do the above general principles (spatial autocorrelation, spatial heterogeneity, geographic similarity) hold and serve as the analytical frames for geographers and GIscientists? 2) How do these principles relate to emerging concepts and framings in other subfields (Dunn 2021)? and 3) What, if any, new principles (laws) and analytical frames have emerged from the recent literature addressing the new challenges in geography and GIScience?