Quantitative Limits to Qualitative Engagements: GIS, Its Critics, and the Philosophical Divide∗

∗Many thanks to the suggestions of the three reviewers, whose probing questions have helped to produce an ultimately more thoughtful work. I am also grateful to Nadine Schuurman and Paul Kingsbury for their insights on the subject matter of critique, its role in geography, and GIScience.

Abstract

Heated exchanges between critical theorists and GIScientists over geographic information systems (GIS) in 1990s geography gave rise to calls for increased communication between critics and practitioners of the technology and most recently for “hybrid” qualitative–quantitative GIS practices. Although GIS scholars have successfully addressed mid-1990s critiques of the technology by developing a series of critical GIS practices that involve nuanced and reflexive deployments of GIS and assessments of its visual products, theoretical critiques of GIS remain fixated on the epistemological deficiencies of the technology. Despite references to loosening metaphysical tensions across the discipline, this difference in assessments reveals the discourses of critical-theoretic geography and GIScience to remain separated by a trenchant philosophical divide, across which ontological and epistemological commitments are inviolable. The inability to fully reconcile a critical–theoretic epistemology with the explicitly ontological metaphysics of GIS further complicates qualitative engagements with the technology by addressing a series of inconsistencies into GIS praxis arising from the quantitative limits to representation encountered in the formal universe of computing. The persistence of metaphysical tensions in critical engagements with the technology questions the degree to which qualitative methods can be seamlessly hybridized with the quantitative architectures of GIS.

Los acalorados debates que ocurrieron en la geografía de los años 1990 entre teóricos críticos y científicos SIG sobre los sistemas de información geográfica, dieron lugar a llamadas por un incremento de la comunicación entre críticos y practicantes de aquella tecnología y, más recientemente, al reclamo de prácticas SIG cualitativo-cuantitativas “híbridas.” Aunque los científicos SIG de mediados de los 1990 enfrentaron con éxito críticas a la tecnología, mediante el desarrollo de una serie de prácticas SIG críticas que implican el despliegue matizado y reflexivo de los sistemas de información geográfica y la ponderación de sus productos visuales, las críticas teóricas a los SIG subsisten en virtud de las propias deficiencias epistemológicas de la tecnología. Pese a las referencias sobre alivio de las tensiones metafísicas en la disciplina, la diferencia de evaluación revela que los discursos de la geografía crítico-teórica, y de la ciencia GIS, se mantienen separados por una cortante divisoria filosófica, por encima de la cual los compromisos ontológicos y epistemológicos son inviolables. La incapacidad de reconciliar a fondo una epistemología crítico-teórica con la metafísica explícitamente ontológica de los SIG, complica aún más los engranajes cualitativos con la tecnología, al hacer evidente una serie de inconsistencias de la praxis SIG, que emanan de la limitación cuantitativa a la representación en el universo computacional formal. La persistencia de tensiones metafísicas en los compromisos críticos con la tecnología pone en duda el grado con el que los métodos cualitativos puedan llegar a una limpia hibridación con la arquitectura cuantitativa de los SIG.

Key Words:

• critical geography
• formal ontology
• GIS
• hybrid geographies
• philosophical divide

关键词:

• 批判地理学
• 表现本体
• 地理信息系统
• 混合地理
• 哲学鸿沟

Palabras clave:

• geografía crítica
• ontología formal
• SIG
• geografías híbridas
• divisoria filosófica

AGNIESZKA LESZCZYNSKI is a graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, Box 353550, Smith 408, Seattle, WA 98195. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include the philosophy of GIScience, as well as political economy and critical-theoretic perspectives on neogeography.

Notes

∗Many thanks to the suggestions of the three reviewers, whose probing questions have helped to produce an ultimately more thoughtful work. I am also grateful to Nadine Schuurman and Paul Kingsbury for their insights on the subject matter of critique, its role in geography, and GIScience.

¹In this manuscript I use critical–theoretic to refer to the particular brand of poststructuralist discourse coincident with the critical–theoretical turn in 1990s geography and the ascendance of the critical in the discipline (Leitner and Sheppard 2003; Popke 2003; Brown and Knopp 2008). By poststructuralist, I adopt Leitner and Sheppard's (2003) definition of poststructuralism to refer to “a variety of research that … includes significant strands of feminism, postmodernism, … postcolonialism” and queer theory, all of which “are informed by a singular poststructuralist philosophical sensibility” (510).

²Following Wilshire (1969), metaphysics is that branch of philosophy concerned with the two questions of ontology and epistemology.

³Although contemporary human geography is often labeled critical (Sheppard 2005; Blomley 2006), it was poststructuralism specifically that set the critical research agenda for the discipline at the time of its ideological ascendance (Leitner and Sheppard 2003; Popke 2003; Elwood 2006a). For references to the primacy of poststructuralism in contemporary critical-theoretic geography, please see Agnew (2006), Brown and Knopp (2008), Callard (2003), Dixon and Jones (2004a), Elwood (2006a), Leitner and Sheppard (2003), Popke (2003), and Rose (2004) as select examples.

⁴After Strohmayer (2003).

⁵ Popke's (2003) characterization of the emergence of poststructuralism in early 1990s geography.

⁶“The grid” here refers to Dixon and Jones's (1998) “epistemology of the grid,” the isotropic zenith of a binary rationality implicated in the quantification and discretization of hierarchical space most closely affiliated with spatial science.

⁷ Callon and Law (2004) characterize the “romantic” understanding of complexity associated with rationalist science as “[t]he world is a hierarchical tree” (3).

⁸ Brown and Knopp (2008) discuss the philosophical tensions encountered in attempting to “queer GIS” in terms of “colliding epistmeologies.”