Abstract
Human geography studies places —considered not just as spatiotemporal locations , but as places of human significance, such as nations, electoral districts, and parks. Such entities are generally thought of as depending on the beliefs and practices of the peoples who live there. The mind-dependence of such entities, however, leads some to doubt whether we can really make discoveries in human geography, and even whether the entities studied in human geography are real parts of our world. This paper examines the ways in which geographic entities may rightly be said to be mind-dependent, and what consequences this mind-dependence does and does not have regarding whether human geography may be a potential source of knowledge and discovery, and regarding whether we should accept that geographic entities exist.
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Notes
- 1.
I will limit discussion here to the issues raised by the apparent dependence of facts of human geography on the collective intentionality of the local people. Other issues arise regarding whether or to what extent, e.g., the regions of study explicitly introduced by geographers themselves are fiat objects depending on the boundary-drawing activities of geographers (not the collective beliefs and customs of “locals”). I will leave those issues to one side here, since they are not unique to human geography (or other social sciences ), but rather involve general issues for the philosophy of natural as well as social science .
- 2.
Although there may be many sorts of fact referred to in geographic theories that are not land-based in this way, in this paper I will focus on those that are based in place, as these provide a particularly interesting case of mind-dependent facts central to the study of geography.
- 3.
“Believed” here should be taken as a placeholder for any of a number of appropriate intentional relations, including believed to be, regarded as, accepted as, etc.
- 4.
I have intentionally chosen a mountain with local significance and name, since here I am concerned with the social acceptance of fiat boundaries within the local community regarding “their” Mount Kinabalu, rather than the geographer’s drawing of fiat boundaries on a map of significant physical features . Clearly, fiat boundaries accepted by locals versus geographers may differ, and cases of the latter sort must be handled separately.
- 5.
Of course the informal collective concept of a common (or anything else) may ultimately be replaced by a more formal concept that provides conditions for the creation of common land by an act of the monarch or of parliament. This, however, is clearly a replacement concept of what it is to be common that may clash violently with the original informal collective concept. Different concepts attached to the same word may require different methods for creating something that falls under that concept.
- 6.
Note that this must not be confused with merely verbal stipulations about what conditions are required for something to be called a “K”. We do collectively accept certain conditions as sufficient for something to be called a “ewe”, for example, but the kind ewe is not a constructed social kind, since it is not necessary, for something to be a ewe, that anyone accept any sufficient conditions for being a ewe.
- 7.
Department of National Heritage statement DNH 398/96, issued on 17 December 1996 (http://www.britarch.ac.uk/cba/portant3.html).
- 8.
A similar phenomenon may occur in certain cases of fiat boundaries. For although all fiat boundaries depend on human cognition, they need not be deliberately created and maintained. Thus, e.g., Smith discusses cases of individual perceptual (as opposed to collective geographic) fiat boundaries that may be unintentionally created:
The term “fiat” (in the sense of human decision or delineation ) is to be taken in a wide sense, as including not only deliberate choice, as when a restaurant owner designates a particular zone of his restaurant a no-smoking area , but also delineations which come about more or less automatically, as when, by looking out across the landscape, I create without further ado that special type of fiat boundary we call the horizon (Smith 2001: §2).
Similarly, the visible field of a perceiving subject has fiat boundaries created only in virtue of acts of perception, though those fiat boundaries do not require any perceptions or thoughts about them or about boundaries of visual fields generally in order to exist. In such cases, the fiat boundaries do depend on mental states, but not states that are themselves of or about those boundaries (instead they may be about the landscape or a parrot in the distance). It is more difficult to find cases of indirectly created collective geographic fiat objects.
- 9.
Assuming, as seems reasonable, that a group may have a collective intention that P without every member of the group having the intention that P.
- 10.
The regions so marked out by geographers are clearly not pure fiat objects since (if well drawn) they will correspond to certain qualitative differences in the areas ; the boundaries may be considered to be fiat boundaries only insofar as geographers’ ways of demarcating such regions may impose artificially sharp fiat boundaries on what are in fact merely graded distinctions. This artificial (fiat) sharpening of boundaries, however, occurs not only in human geography but also in physical geography and other scientific representations where graded differences in data are grouped into sharply bounded categories. I shall reserve the analysis of such phenomena and their consequences for another occasion.
- 11.
For further discussion of the problem with this dichotomy and a finer-grained set of categories to deal with the in-between cases, see Chapter 8 of Thomasson 1999.
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Thomasson, A.L. (2019). Geographic Objects and the Science of Geography. In: Tambassi, T. (eds) The Philosophy of GIS. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16829-2_8
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