Gunnar Olsson

Philosophy in geography

Some Principles of Ethnogeography.- Erewhon or Nowhere Land.- A Framework for Examination of Theoretic Viewpoints in Geography.- Thirteen Axioms of a Geography of the Public Sector.- On the Set Theoretic Foundations of the Regionalization Problem.- Reality, Process, and the Dialectical Relation Between Man and Environment.- Signals in the Noise.- Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science.- Alternatives to a Positive Economic Geography.- Social Geography and the Taken-For-Granted World.- Dialectics and Geography.- Beyond the Census: Data Needs and Urban Policy Analysis.- Social Science and Human Action or on Hitting Your Head Against the Ceiling of Language.- Problems in the Psychological Modelling of Revealed Destination Choice.- An Open Letter on the Dematerialization of the Geographic Object.- Land Use and Commodity Production.- Spatial Interaction and Geographic Theory.- Cellular Geography.- Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective.- A Periodic Table of Spatial Hierarchies.- Unconventional Name Index.- Reference List.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.

Explanation, Prediction, and Meaning Variance: An Assessment of Distance Interaction Models

The concept of spatial interaction is central for everyone concerned with theoretical geography and regional science. One reason may simply be that the term usually is defined so vaguely that it encompasses most forces which contribute to the birth, death, growth, and stability of spatial systems. Ullman [74] has in fact argued that the concept is even more general than that of areal differentiation, while Ackerman [1, p. 437] has related it more explicitly to the notions of connectivity and information flows. Similarly, Maruyama [42] and other general systems scientists have noted how interaction and information

Space and spatiality in theory

This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on ‘Space and Spatiality in Theory’ which was held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC, April 2010. In the article, the panel map out some of the challenges for thinking, writing and performing spaces in the 21st century, reflecting upon the emergence of new ways of theorizing space and spatiality, the relationship between writing, action and spacing, and the emergence of distinctive spatialized ontologies (e.g. ‘movement-space’) which appear to reflect epistemological and technological shifts in how our worlds are thought, produced and inhabited. The panellists stress the importance of recognizing the partial nature of Anglophone theoretical approaches, and they argue for more situated and modest theories. They also reflect upon the importance of a wide range of disciplinary knowledges and practices to their thinking on the spatialities of the world, from philosophy and the natural sciences to art and poetry.

Social Science and Human Action or on Hitting Your Head Against the Ceiling of Language

This piece begins as an academic paper about what the social sciences are and it ends as a manifesto of what they ought to be. The message is thoroughly ideological, for ideology is defined as that ethical glue whereby is and ought are forged together into a coherent whole. In the first part, I shall provide a succinct but novel summary of a long and complicated argument recently developed elsewhere.1 In the second, I shall explore some implications of those thoughts. In neither case shall I draw anything but a rough caricature. But that may be just as well, for it is usually easier to see the prominent features in a caricature than in a fascimile reproduction.

APPROACHES TO SIMULATIONS OF URBAN GROWTH

geographic knowledge, but their further development has been facilitated by the adoption of interdisciplinary quantitative techniques. In this way, Statistics, Operations Research, Regional Science and Economics have played an important role for modern Geography. It is only rarely, however, that these techniques have been applicable to spatial problems without considerable changes and modifications in the original formulations.1 In this development, it has been crucial to recognize a minimum number of basic variables, by which any spatial system can be fully described. Thus, it is generally agreed that spatial descriptions can be accomplished simply by specification of distances, angles, and connectivity within a set of spatially distributed points or locations.2 Out of these concepts, distance is probably most important. But it is also a very complex notion, quantifiable in physical, economical, time and a variety of sociological terms.3 Generally, these units of measurement can be projected into each other and much work has been devoted to the search for correct trans-

Correspondence Rules and Social Engineering

In a series of recent papers, I have argued that the planning for future societies will require a combination of visionary politics and sophisticated social engineering [28, 29, 30, 31]. In particular, I have argued that any social engineering experiment should be firmly anchored in explanatory as opposed to predictive analyses. The reason is, of course, that only explanatory analyses can indicate the possible secondary effects of a specific action. In terms of research strategy, modified variants of the Hempel-Oppenheim [20] schema of scientific explanation seem to provide possible vehicles suited for this task. As recalled, positivists like Hempel [19] advocate that the term scientific explanation should be used to denote the procedure employed when a description of the explanandum, (E), defined as the empirical phenomenon under investigation, is deduced from the explanans, defined as a combination of a set of initial

The Social Space of Silence

It is in the physical concreteness of the social space of silence that it cannot be abstracted. The reason is that every text is permeated by the notion of self-reference. The impossible challenge is nevertheless to think-and-act in such a way that there is no difference between the languages I am writing in and the phenomena I am writing about. Eventually this raises inescapable questions about the power of language and the language of power, about the truth of silence and the silence of truth, about mental prefixes and linguistic experiments, about you and me.

Chiasm of Thought-and-Action

How do I know the difference between you and me and how do we share our beliefs in the same? How are we made so obedient and so predictable? As a minimalist approach to these questions I imagine human thought-and-action as a double helix, It is assumed firstly, that man is a semiotic animal, a species whose individuals are kept together and apart by their use of signs; secondly, that every sign within itself combines elements of drastically different ontologies. This invisible world is then captured in a three-dimensional coordinate system whose axes are those of identity, difference, and intentionality. While the resulting map is anchored in fix-points of silence, the real world of socialization and understanding is always in flux. The paper closes with a pastiche on Carl von Linnés Flora Suecica; in the current world of thought-and-action, signifier and signified are assigned the same ordering functions as stamina and pistil once were in the world of plants. How do I draw the invisible lines of the taken-for-granted? How do I project a dematerialized point onto a transparent plane?

From a = b to a = a

In this paper I compare and contrast the alternative treatments of the Other as they appear first in the radical geography of 1968, then in the political geography of 1998. While in the Hegelian sixties both the master and the slave recognized that they are defined in terms of each other (a = b), the politically correct of the nineties are claiming that the right to define who you are is yours and yours alone (a = a). But whoever argues that the only acceptable truth lies in the statement “I am who I am” is in effect adopting the same conception of power that the Old Testament JHWH reserved for himself.

Towards a critique of cartographical reason

Abstract This paper asks how we find our way in the hitherto unknown. In search of an answer, the author returns to the three Critiques of Immanuel Kant, noting especially their grounding in the geometric mode of (re)presentation and the thingification processes connected therewith. It is argued that Kants choice of metaphors in effect makes him more of a geographer than of a philosopher. To understand the taken‐for‐granted of thought‐and‐action, the time has therefore come for the writing of a fourth volume entitled A Critique of Cartographical Reason. The focus must there be on the relations between personal pronouns and prepositions, on the one hand, and the powers of tautology, on the other.