Unlawful Relations and Verbal Inflation

Abstract

here are two rather basic questions to ask about Tobler's first law of geography. Is it a law? Is it true? These might at first appear to be one question expressed in two ways, but they are not. When I ask if Tobler's law is, indeed, a law, I am asking whether it, as a statement, has the form and character of those statements we normally recognize as laws. Lacking this form, Tobler's law cannot be a law, even if its propositions are true. A statement that takes the semantic form of a law is not, by this fact alone, entitled to the status of law, however. We must also, of course, be justified in believing that the generalizations of the law are true. I will argue that the answer to both of these basic questions is no. Before embarking on the argument I would like to make it clear that I am not criticizing Waldo Tobler, or even the statement published in 1970. Taken in context, with allowances made for a degree of irony to which all of us are at times tempted, the statement we now know as Tobler's Law of is unexceptionable. Lifted from that context, stripped of irony, and enshrined as a motto of the discipline, the statement becomes something altogether different. It becomes a majestic statement to which I, at least, take rather strong exception. I think we can say with relative certainty that Tobler's statement would never have enjoyed this fame, or suffered this scrutiny, if he hadn't used the word law. This is what the statement says in its excised, unironical, majestic form. The First Law of Geography is that is related to everything else, but near are more related than distant things (Tobler 1970). Had Tobler written, for instance, that geographers assume that everything is related to everything else, and believe that, as a rule, near are more related than distant things, I am sure I would not be writing this article today. No, the beacon that draws us to this statement is the word law.