Abstract
Geographical information science is interesting from a philosophical point of view because the distinctions that its practitioners find themselves compelled to make have important resonances with distinctions that have been proposed in other contexts. An example is the dichotomy between object-based and field-based presentations of geographical data. This paper explores the relationships amongst a set of closely aligned distinctions which have appeared in the literature on both spatial and temporal reasoning in philosophy, cognitive science, geographical science, linguistics and other fields. Any systematic account of such distinctions must inform the construction of a workable ontology for spatio-temporal sciences such as geography.
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Notes
- 1.
Couclelis (1992) refers to the process of creating a vector model as that of ‘carving up the continuous landscape into discrete objects’. The continuous/discrete contrast is here aligned not with raster/vector so much as with reality/model, the model being understood to be vector-based.
- 2.
Compare (Peuquet 1994), where the parallel is drawn between the raster/vector dichotomy and ‘objective’ versus ‘subjective’ views of space. Note that objective/subjective and absolute/relative form another pair of dichotomies which, though quite distinct, are closely enough related to be often confused.
- 3.
Notwithstanding Gordon’s assertion that ‘the distinction between a material and a structure is never very clear’ (Gordon 1968). But Gordon’s otherwise excellent discussion shows little sensitivity to the mass/count distinction, e.g. between material (mass) and a piece of material (count), and between a structure (count) and what might be called ‘structured material’, characterised by the indefinite repetition of structural units. Greater sensitivity is shown by Vogel (1988): ‘Bone is made of several materials in an orderly array; but is bone therefore a structure or merely a composite material; or do we call bone generically a material but a particular bone, with shape, a structure?’
- 4.
More generally, Bunt (1985) speaks of ‘phenomena that we perceive not as consisting of discrete elements, but as having a more or less homogeneous, continuous structure’.
- 5.
See Johansson (1998) for a discussion of the notion of pattern as an important ontological category. Johansson’s patterns are not far removed from the notion of texture used here. Johansson hints at a distinction between a count interpretation of pattern as a bounded patterned unity and a mass interpretation as an indefinitely extensible texture, but he does not explicitly acknowledge the importance of the mass/count distinction here.
- 6.
Muller (1998) advocates a thoroughgoing four-dimensionalism in which the objects of enquiry are chunks of spacetime with no preferential form of slicing assumed; but within this framework, he accords privileged status to the notion of a ‘temporal slice’. Note also that there is no discussion of how the mass/count distinction is manifested in the four-dimensional world.
- 7.
Zemach (1970) distinguishes four possible ontological schemes by whether they treat their entities as persisting across space, over time, both, or neither, and claims that all four are used in everyday thinking, though not with the same frequency.
- 8.
This latter is the point of view of the Event Calculus (Kowalski and Sergot 1986) which has been highly influential in the development of temporal reasoning schemes for Artificial Intelligence.
- 9.
In the terminology of Peuquet (1984), this is ‘adjacent polygon’  data.
- 10.
At a finer granularity it looks more discrete: the successive addition of new buildings, streets, etc. At a finer granularity still all these events consist of the continuous motion of matter.
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Galton, A. (2019). Space, Time and the Representation of Geographical Reality. In: Tambassi, T. (eds) The Philosophy of GIS. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16829-2_4
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