The Road from Mandalay: Towards a Geographical Philosophy

Abstract

SOME years ago, in 1962, Sir Isaiah Berlin,3 in attempting to define the field and purpose of philosophy, maintained that the history of human knowledge was essentially the process of formulating questions that occurred to mankind in such a way that they could be allocated into two 'viable' categories, viz. those questions whose answers ultimately depend on the data of observation, the empirical-and those that could be answered by pure calculation untrammelled by factual knowledge-the formal, and argued that the role of philosophy was to examine those questions that could not be neatly allocated into either of these two categories. Such questions were exceedingly diverse. Some appeared to be questions of fact, others of value; some concerned the conceptual frameworks of language; some were about the various methods used by scientists in pursuit of explanatory theory and prediction; some were about the methods employed by Everyman in the ordinary affairs of life; others concerned the relations between various provinces of human knowledge; some dealt with the frameworks of thought; others with the correct ends of moral or social or political action-but all, he believed, had this in common, that they could not yet be answered exclusively by observation or calculation, by inductive or deductive methods and, in consequence, those who sought to answer them had no obvious frame of reference. If one accepts this definition of the role of philosophy then it seems to me that the experiences of philosophy and geography have much in common. Speaking then as one whose geographical labours have been largely in the behavioural field and who has fallen far short of the ideal of formal 'deductivism' as defined by Popper4 but who, nevertheless, if we are to 381