Do Mountains Exist? Towards an Ontology of Landforms

TLDR

The paper questions whether mountains exist, noting that answers vary with context and are surprisingly difficult to determine. In environmental modeling, mountains are treated as parts of elevation fields whose gradients influence runoff direction and erosion intensity, rather than as distinct constituents. The authors find that mountains exist as real correlates of human thought and action and serve as archetypes for geographic objects, yet individual mountains and the category lack many properties of natural kinds, implying that while an object‑based ontology is needed for everyday conceptions and spatial reasoning, environmental modeling can rely on field‑based topographic databases.

Abstract

The authors begin the paper with the question ‘Do mountains exist?’ They show that providing an answer to this question is surprisingly difficult and that the answer that one gives depends on the context in which the question is posed. Mountains clearly exist as real correlates of everyday human thought and action, and they form the archetype for geographic objects. Yet individual mountains lack many of the properties that characterize bona fide objects, and ‘mountains’ as a category also lacks many of the properties that characterize natural kinds. In the context of scientific modeling of the environment, especially of such phenomena as surface hydrology and fluvial erosion and deposition, mountains are not picked out as constituents of reality in their own right at all; rather, they are just parts of the field of elevations whose gradients shape the direction of runoff and influence the intensity of erosion. Thus, although an object-based ontology of mountains and other landforms is required to do justice to our everyday conceptions of the environment and to support spatial reasoning and natural language processing, topographic databases designed to support environmental modeling can be field-based at geographic scales.