Abstract
For more than a decade, many Anglo-American geographers have been attracted to the model of scientific progress developed by Thomas Kuhn as a framework for interpreting the recent history of their discipline.1 The notions of ‘paradigms’ and ‘revolutions’ have remained in the literature, despite the criticisms of Kuhn’s work by many other historians of science, the problems of transferring ideas from the natural to the social sciences, the rejection of those ideas by other social scientists, and the increasing weight of evidence from within geography which confronts the essential concepts of Kuhn’s model. Thus the changes in methodology and philosophy which have been introduced to geography since the American based ‘quantitative and theoretical revolutions’ of the 1950s have been interpreted as paradigm shifts or revolutions terminating periods of normal science which create disciplinary consensus over means and ends.
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Notes and References
T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962);
for its use in geography, see R.J. Johnston, Geography and Geographers: Anglo American Geography Since 1945 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979).
H.E. Bracey, Social Provision in Rural Wiltshire (London: Methuen, 1952).
G.C. Dickinson, ‘The nature of rural population movement — an analysis of seven Yorkshire parishes based on electoral returns 1931–1954’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, vol 10 (1958) pp. 95–108.
See J.L. Newman, ‘The use of the term “hypothesis” in geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 63 (1973) p. 23.
IGU, Proceedings of the Urban Geography Symposium (1960).
S. Godlund, ‘Bus services in Sweden’, Lund Studies in Geography, series B (1956).
F.H.W. Green, ‘Urban hinterlands in England and Wales: an analysis of bus services’, in J.P. Gibbs (ed.) Urban Research Methods (Princeton University Press, 1961).
W. Bunge, Theoretical Geography (Gleerups, 1966).
R.G.D. Allen, Mathematical Analysis for Economists (London: Macmillan, 1938).
S. Gregory, Statistical Methods for the Geographer (London: Longman, 1963).
See, for example, E.W. Burgess, ‘The growth of the city’, in R.E. Park and E.W. Burgess (eds), The City (University of Chicago Press, 1967).
E. Jones, A Social Geography of Belfast (London, 1960).
For an example of Timms’ work, see The Urban Mosaic (Cambridge University Press, 1971).
R.J. Johnston, ‘Choice in classification’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 58 (1968) pp. 575–89.
See, for example, R.J. Chorley, ‘A re-evaluation of the geomorphic significance of W.M. Davis’, in R.J. Chorley and P. Haggett (eds), Frontiers in Geographical Teaching (London, 1965).
H.M. Blalock, Social Statistics, 2nd edn (New York, 1979).
R.J. Johnston, Urban Residential Patterns (London: Bell, 1971).
P.R. Gould, ‘On mental maps’, reprinted in R.M. Downs and D. Stea (eds), Image and Environment (London: Edward Arnold, 1973) pp. 182–218.
J.S. Adams, ‘Directional bias in intra-urban migration’, Economic Geography, vol. 45 (1969) pp. 302–23.
L.F. Schnore, The Urban Scene (New York: The Free Press, 1965).
W. Mangin, ‘Latin American squatter settlements: a problem and a solution’, Latin American Research Review, vol. 2 (1967) pp. 65–98;
J.F.C. Turner. ‘Uncontrolled urban settlement: problems and policies’, in G. Breese (ed.), The City in Newly Developing Countries (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969) pp. 507–34.
R.J. Johnston, ‘Towards a general model of intra-urban residential patterns’, in C. Board, R.J. Chorley, P. Haggett and D.R. Stoddart (eds), Progress in Geography, vol. 4 (1972) pp. 83–124.
K. Cox, ‘The voting decision in a spatial context in Board et at.’, Progress in Geography, vol. 1 (1969) pp. 31–118.
R.J. Johnston and P. Taylor, Geography of Elections (London, 1979).
R.J. Johnston, ‘Electoral and political geography’, Australian Geographical Studies, vol. 18 (1980).
A.J. Rose, ‘Dissent from down under: metropolitan primacy as the normal state’, Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 7 (1966) pp. 1–27.
R.J. Johnston, City and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).
R.J. Johnston, Spatial Structures (London: Methuen, 1973).
R.J. Johnston, ‘Mental maps: an assessment’, in J. Rees and P.T. Newby (eds), Behavioural Perspectives in Geography: A Symposium (Hendon: Middlesex Polytechnic, 1974) pp. 1–12.
R.J. Johnston, The World Trade System (London: Bell, 1978).
I. Wallace, in the Canadian Geographer, vol. 22 (1978).
R.J. Johnston, Content Foci in Urban Geography, Monash Publications in Geography, vol. 4 (1972).
See D. Harvey, Explanation in Geography (London: Arnold, 1969).
R.J. Johnston, The American Urban System (London: Longman, 1982).
D. Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Arnold, 1973).
R.J. Johnston, Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems (Oxford University Press, 1979).
R.J. Johnston, in Progress in Geography, vol. 5 (1980).
R.J. Johnston, Geography and the State (London: Macmillan, 1982).
G. Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair (Cambridge University Press, 1976) p. 253.
R.J. Johnston, ‘On the nature of explanation in geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., vol. 5 (1980) pp. 402–12.
E.D. Perle, ‘On normative analyses and factorial ecologies—a response to Johnston’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 10 (1978) pp. 1, 207–1, 209.
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Johnston, R.J. (1983). A Foundling Floundering in World Three. In: Billinge, M., Gregory, D., Martin, R. (eds) Recollections of a Revolution. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17416-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17416-4_3
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