ON LAWS IN GEOGRAPHY

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although many geographers have discussed philosophical problems related to "explanation''and "theories''in geography, few have attempted to examine the question of the types of laws and their occurrence in the discipline. It is suggested here that at least five different types of laws may be formulated by geographers, such as Cross-Section, Equilibrium, Historical, Developmental, and Statistical. By following principles of logical reasoning about geographic facts, geographers may discover laws from statistical to process types which emphasize spatial relationships between these facts.