Vermont Couple Builds Tiny House

Everyday people build a tiny house at the end of their driveway and blog about it. The blog includes a public spreadsheet of the costs, and lots of tips on how to get it done. This is just the kind of thing I would very much like to do at my house. Some day.

My Take on The GIS: Tool or Science Question

I am trying to write an end-of-the semester paper and am going over some ideas from an old class and came across this paper. I thought it was pretty good. Read on if you want to take in your humble blogger's thoughts on science, knowledge and GIS.

The Status of Geographical Information Systems in Academia

By Toby Gray

GR 8990

Philosophy and Ethics in Geography

March 23, 2011

     The computational power and graphic capabilities of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have brought dramatic changes to geography and allied fields, just as the wider so-called “digital revolution” has profoundly changed human civilizations worldwide. Complex operations in spatial statistics, such as kriging, to take one example, which in the pre-digital age required advanced technical knowledge and laborious, time-consuming effort, can now be done by anyone instantly. These technical advances promulgate new questions of appropriateness, privilege, map interpretation and epistemological assumptions. The basic questions have been around for a long time in the disciplines of geography, cartography, landscape architecture, ecology and allied fields. The complex and dynamic epistemological environment created by the technological advances of GIS constitute a new field of knowledge appropriate for advanced study. We have moved well beyond the notion, discussed by Wright et al. (1997) and Goodchild (1992), that GIS is a mere software package appropriate only in an undergraduate curriculum for students who want to apply it to the science of geography.

     As a new technology in the process of expansion and homesteading in new intellectual fields and territories, the ontological status of GIS within the academy is still undetermined. As external entities, particularly governmental agencies, demand more GIS-based products, the funding status of GIS seems sound. But where does GIS fit in an academic institution? As an area of technical expertise? As a unit within geography? Or as an emerging autonomous science breaking away from her more established cousins, much like geography in the 1880s?

     These questions have been addressed in a number of papers in terms of a “tool or science” debate. This debate actually informs and advances a larger debate about the ontological status of science more than it demystifies the ontological status of GIS. This paper will argue that the answer to the “tool or science” question depends on how one defines those terms, a very tricky problem in and of itself. I will argue that many geographers, leery of being associated with expressions of positivism, define science so broadly that, in the end, nothing is science. I will advocate for a strict, positivist definition of science, one that relegates GIS to the tool category. I will also assert that mathematics and languages are also tools and that tools have primacy over science and are therefore certainly worthy of post-graduate study.

     In order to determine whether GIS is a tool or a science one must first define the terms “tool” and “science.” Pickles (1997) takes Wright et al. (1997) to task for failing to adequately define “science,” ignoring that fact that they don’t even attempt to define “tool.” The problem, of course, is that any attempt to define “science” involves the writer in thorny, centuries-old philosophical debates. These debates have taken on a sharper focus in the last few decades due to the post-modernist, or deconstructivist, critique of the more excessive claims of positivism, and to efforts by “human geographers” to expand the field of science to include more dynamic and meaningful kinds of epistemologies. When Wright et al. (1997) do define “science,” they do so in the context of disassociating science with positivist expression, resulting in a definition that could conceivably include the arts and sciences. Goodchild (2000), by contrast, in an unambiguously positivistic stroke, includes an image of Pieter Brueghel’s “The Tower of Babel” (1563) with his essay and ends on an unapologetically positivistic note regarding the capabilities of digital spatial technology for the creation of “a new Tower of Babel, to be created by a conscious effort to overcome problems of communication.”

A Broad Definition of Science Makes Everything a Tool

     Goodchild (2000) is virtually alone in his willingness to express faith in the power of quantifiable fields of data and logical processes, the structure of GIS, to solve problems and advance civilization in any meaningful way. Wright et al. (1997) mention that GIS is perceived by some as “positivisms second coming” and by others as “a last-ditch rally by positivism’s battered survivors.” It is amusing to wonder where Goodchild is in this scenario. We should also note that Goodchild is a co-auther of the Wright et al. (1997) paper.

Wright et al. (1997) are more cautious when it comes to associations with positivist expression. They doubt that a concise definition of science is even possible. Science, they say “encompasses a wide range of fields that differ widely from each other in philosophy, knowledge content, and methodology.” They offer one definition of the term “science” as “shorthand for a logical and systematic approach to problems that seeks generalizable answers.” In their conclusion they note “older notions of science as the equivalent of “hard science” are being replaced by a more open view.” They mention Johnston’s (1986) view of science as “the pursuit of systematic and formulated knowledge, and as such [it] is not confined to any particular epistemology.”

     The problem with such definitions is that they don’t exclude the arts and humanities, which are also “systematic and formulated.” Scholars in literary criticism, history or comparative literature do not employ symbol-based formulas to the degree that scientists do, but their individual works of scholarship do not exist in a vacuum either. On the contrary, scholarship in the arts and humanities are nestled within paradigms (Marxist, Freudian, deconstructivist, etc.,) that can and do constrain methods to the point that the methods become every bit as “formulated” as those used by scientists.

     Pushing the boundary between arts and sciences in this direction is a consequence of the critique of positivist methodologies by “human” geographers. It is an aspect of the tension between qualitative and quantitative researchers that characterizes the field of geography today. It is related to the deconstructivist (or post-modernist) dismantling of modernism in other areas of academia during the past several decades. Expanding geography to include human, or psychological, experiences of places in order to explore the “meaning” or “sense” of place may be an admirable goal. But doing so while maintaining strongly that geography is a true science allows for anything that can be studied systematically (virtually everything taught at a major research university) to be considered a science, GIS included. To those of us who still hold that objectivity and verifiability are possible, and that these concepts have a special and attractive potency when it comes to solving problems, this broad definition of science is not welcome news. We worry along with Anne Godlewska as quoted in Harley (1990) that “literature has come to history, unfurling her circus silks of metaphor and allegory, misprision and aporia, trace and sign, demanding that historians accept her mocking presence right at the heart of what they  once insisted was their own autonomous and truly scientific discipline.” If she can do it to history, she can do it to us.

     If every systematic epistemology is science, then science looses its particular status, and, in effect, there is no science. We might as well consider everything a tool. In the simplest epistemological matrix there is the subject, a self-aware observer, and an external object, and everything in between constitutes a collection of tools by which the subject attempts to understand or apprehend the object. The five senses are tools. All epistemological systems are tools. Dreams, prayers, and memories are tools that yield profound yet difficult-to-asses information. Science is a tool used by humans to apprehend external reality. An established hard science, like geology, for example, does not generate any data by itself, but rather observes natural phenomena in order to get data. “Doing geology” means looking at data in light of a particular body of knowledge with a particular history and a particular set of assumptions and thereby transforming data into information. Geologists, then, are using the “tool” of geology to make defensible statements about the processes of the earth.

A Strict Definition of Science

     Lutus (2008) writes as if the idea that mathematics is not a pure science is arrived at by pure ignorance. Actually, serious discussions about the status of mathematics, centered on the fact that it is essentially theoretical rather than empirical, have been around for a long time. The discussion appears in Entrikin’s (1984) article about Carl O. Sauer in which he discusses Thomas C. Chamberlin’s inversion of the Comtean hierarchy of sciences. According to Entrikin, Chamberlin and Sauer viewed mathematical equations and theoretical constructions as tentative and instrumental. According to this viewpoint, the real purpose for mathematics is to aid in the discovery and accumulation of facts. Whenever empirical science discovers facts that contradict the speculations of the theoretical sciences, the tangible evidence takes priority. Chamberlin and Sauer did not deny that physics and mathematics are sciences, they were merely asserting the primacy of empiricism. Lutus (2008) in turn inverts Chamberlin and Sauer by asserting that nature speaks in mathematics, descriptions of nature depend on mathematics “completely,” and mathematics is, therefore, as Carl Friedich Gauss put it, “the queen of the sciences.”

     Lutus (2008) asserts that mathematics possesses “all the key elements of science, e.g. theory, evidence and falsifiability.” He paradoxically, then, acknowledges that mathematics is capable of saying things that are conclusively true, “without the possibility of later refutation”. He calls this a “distinction between mathematics and the other sciences – in mathematics, you can construct a true or false statement, while in the other sciences you can only construct statements that are either probably true or definitely false.” When it comes to the mathematical proof, no amount of evidence gathered can ever falsify the proof, because the proof meets the standards for validity established by mathematics. Lutus believes this aspect makes mathematics a better kind of science, whereas I think it crosses an important dividing line between science and non-science.

     Incidentally, falsification also occurs in the arts and humanities. The critical difference is that discredited ideas never really go away. Symbolism and Freudianism may be out of fashion now, but both frameworks are dynamic enough and have enough persuasive power to sustain a core of adherents. Since science and the arts and humanities interact unceasingly through history, new discoveries and developments may cause these discarded methods to rise again in new forms. The geocentric universe, on the other hand, is gone for good.

     Lutus makes the legitimate claim that mathematical concepts are ubiquitous in nature. He presents the fact that cicadas have gained an evolutionary advantage by appearing in swarms on 13 and 17 year cycles. Predators that appear in shorter yearly intervals are less likely to encounter cicadas on a regular basis, since 13 and 17 are prime numbers and therefore impossible to synchronize temporally with shorter annual cycles. The species is unknowingly, through the algorithm of evolution, taking advantage of a numerical property, and our understanding of that property (the fact that prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and one), helps us to understand nature. Lutus quotes Richard Feynman on this point: nature speaks to us in mathematics.

     I agree that nature speaks to us in mathematics. Spanish people speak to us in Spanish. Russian people speak to us in Russian. But Spanish and Russian are not sciences and neither is mathematics. All three are systematic, organized and highly complex symbol systems that allow us to code, transmit and understand information about the outside world. All of these are tools. Tools don’t generate their own phenomena or data. Tools are, however, instrumental in transforming data into information. Science transforms information into knowledge.

     One could argue that the sciences, biology, chemistry, geology, etc, do not generate their own phenomena or data either. They just observe external reality within the context of their particular paradigms. This argument brings us back to the notion that everything is a tool. Basically, if everything is science, then nothing is science. If everything is a tool, then nothing is science. If we want to have something that we call “science” and have such a thing be distinct from “tools,” we must define both terms rather sharply.

A narrow definition of science would emphasize that conclusive proofs are not possible, that new data become available constantly, and theories may have to be adjusted or abandoned. Quantification and validation (along with their acknowledged limitations) are at the core, and questions of human value, meaning and qualitative assessment, while ever-present, inhabit the fuzzy boundaries between the sciences, allied disciplines, and the arts and humanities. All academic scholarship, whether in the fields of art, science, or humanities, should be in a constant dialogue. All are essential to the purposes of the academy and the improvement of humankind. There is no hierarchy in this view.

     Except for one thing: I would put the tools on top. I agree with Lutus (2008) that nature speaks in mathematics and that science is completely dependent on mathematics. Mathematics should drape the sciences and foreign languages (or linguistics) should drape the humanities. Knowing anything well involves knowing the expressive power of multiple codes. GIS is one of the most powerful intellectual tools to come along in the past century, and, as part of the digital revolution, is changing human civilization forever. GIS is a dynamic platform by which spatial statistics can be transmitted graphically in the form of maps. These maps can be online, interactive, and updated in real-time using remotely-sensed data. Anyone familiar with the technology will find the dreams and speculations of GIS experts from 15 years ago to be very interesting in light of all that has been accomplished since. The next 15 years are going to be just as exciting. Academic institutions must not only understand the dynamic possibilities offered by this corner of the digital revolution, they must also actively create new possibilities and new technologies. The “tool or science” debate is actually one about philosophical paradigms. However GIS is perceived in that sense, its status as a field of knowledge capable of significant contributions to science should not be doubted.

Works Discussed:

Entrikin, J. Nicholas. 1984. Carl O. Sauer, philosopher in spite of himself. The Geographical Review 74:4.

Goodchild, M. F., 1992: Geographical Information Science. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 6, 31–46.

Goodchild, M. F., 2000: Communicating Geographic Information in a Digital Age. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90, 344–355.

Harley, J. B., 1990: Cartography, Ethics, and Social Theory. Cartographica, 27, 1–23.

Lutus, P., 2008: Is Mathematics a Science? Unpublished work available online at http://www.arachnoid.com/is_math_a_science/index.html

Pickles, J., 1997: Tool or Science? GIS, Technoscience, and the Theoretical Turn. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87, 363–372.

Wright, D. J., M. F. Goodchild, and J. D. Proctor, 1997: GIS: Tool or Science? Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87, 346–362.

Bad news from North Carolina. While working quickly to suppress what sounds to me like a major fire, crews plowed under a section of Sandy Run Savannas State Natural Area known to contain a number of rare and endangered plants. Hard to find who to blame here. The key is to know as much as you can about your habitat so that you can think fast in an emergency -or have protocols in place so that you don't have to think.