By Benno Werlen
This is often the 1st English translation of a ebook which has been well known in Europe as an immense contribution to the interface among geography and social idea. formidable, crackling with unique rules and persuasively argued, it increases intriguing new implications for the research of house and social concept.
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Extra info for Society, Action and Space: An Alternative Human Geography
Sample text
The main aim of research into the physical world14 is, as noted, to make ‘ingenious and severe attempts’ to refute scientific theories about world 1 which have thus far been held to be true, and which have provided a framework for bold and ingenious conjectures (con text of discovery). In this way we approach nearer to objective truth, and basic research can be directed by theoretical interests alone. The relation of world 3 to world 1 should be investigated by means of causal explanation, in such away that the explanations put forward can be empirically refuted (context of justification).
The boldness of a hypothesis, and thus its falsification potential, is the greater the more information it contains. 10 The information content increases as the hypothesis’ ‘if’ components become more general, and its ‘then’ components more specific and precise. The hypotheses formulated must however also be meaningful in relation to current knowledge (world 3), if growth of knowledge is to be achieved. Crucially, Popper’s postulate of an ‘objective epistemology without a knowing subject’ means that the growth of knowledge is no longer dependent on the conscious subject, but on world 3: the advance towards an absolute truth independent of any subject.
Truth is rather achieved by a process, a method which adopts a critical attitude, and which is committed to critical discussion. The elimination of error in the sphere of everyday life is complemented in the scientific sphere by conscious criticism, with its controlling idea of the search for truth: ‘Criticism consists in the search for contradictions and in their elimination’ (Popper 1979:126). The critical method can be more precisely defined with the aid of two distinctions between positivist empiricism and classical rationalism.