Abstract

According to ontological perspectivism, there can be, in principle, multiple and alternative perspectives on the world that can be sliced, systematized, and conceptualized in different ways. Surely, such an ontological position has many categorial implications, which may vary depending on different disciplinary contexts. This paper explores parts of these implications in the realm of geography. In particular, it aims at discussing the ontological categories that one might use to describe the geographical world in an overarching perspective – that is, the perspective that puts toether all the partial views coming from the different branches of the geographical investigation. We will see that if the overarching perspective is expected to include all the views on the geographical world, then such a perspective should be all-embracing in terms of contents and categories. This means that the overarching perspective might also comprehend inconsistencies that derive from how the various partial perspectives conceptualize differently the geographical world.

Highlights

  • By paraphrasing the words of Katherine Munn, a geographical perspective may be conceived of as an act of cognitively partitioning the geographical world – that is, an act that draws a mental division between those things upon which we are focusing and those which fall outside our domain of interest (Munn, 2008: 12)

  • To be more precise, according to Egenhofer and Mark (1995), such an overarching geographical perspective focuses on the space in which we move around and that may be conceptualized from multiple views

  • According to Egenhofer and Mark (1995), such a perspective should represent the mesoscopic stratum of spatial reality that may be conceptualized from multiple views, with different tools, aims, theoretical assumptions, and so forth. This means that the geographical world can be studied, sliced and systematize from a plurality of geographical perspectives, which may be put together in order to form the overarching one (§ 3)

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Summary

Geographical Inventories

If a (geographical) perspective draws a line between things upon which we are focusing and other things upon which we are not, one might suppose that every perspective has its own list of things: that is, a specific inventory of entities upon which the. We might observe that one of the key issues in making an inventory of entities consists in not neglecting the perspective (be it conceived in terms of aims, points of view, tools, and so on) we assume That is because such a perspective can have a relevant influence on our conceptualization. If we were to draw up an inventory of the contents of a sweet box, we might be interested in the total number of sweets, classifying such sweets in accordance with their different kinds (gummies, caramels, liquorices, and so on) or with their properties (color, shape, and so forth), or maybe our interest might concern all the items (number, kinds, properties) listed before. Should we not consider the possibility that some of these advancements and/or modifications have introduced further perspectives on the geographical world and that, for example, the geographical inventory of an ancient roman can differ, in some respects, from contemporary inventories? (Tambassi, 2019b)

Overlapping Perspectives
Ontological Integration
The Two Levels of the Geo‐Ontological Categorization
What and How to Categorize
Multiple Geographical Categories
Conclusion
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