From Professional Geography to Public Geography, from Representational Certainty to Not Knowing the Answer

Abstract

Most practices of professional geography employ a realist ontology of knowledge, seeking accurate representations of an external world that exists in itself, prior to our attempts to know it. Certainty in the accuracy of our interior representations of an external world, however, breeds dogmatic claims to truth in the attempt to bridge the unbridgeable gap separating matter from mind. A reading of Rorty’s (2021) posthumously published Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism offers an escape from authoritarian certainty by charting a shift from professional geography to a public geography (although he never used that term). Making this move entails a shift from analysis to conversation; from abstract theorization to the extension of loyalty to the widest possible plurality of publics; and from representing an antecedent truth to the pragmatist’s goal of reaching collective agreement on what to do. Rorty’s antiauthoritarian pragmatism makes a compelling case to stop thinking of knowledge as correctly answering a multiple-choice question in which the answer is known in advance and instead to nurture a public geography aimed toward the larger challenge of negotiating collective agreement on how we should live together in an interdependent world.

大多数专业地理学实践都运用了知识的现实主义本体论——在试图理解外部世界之前, 旨在准确表达本就存在的外部世界。然而, 在连接物质与思想之间不可连接的鸿沟的努力中, 由于我们确信能够准确地表达外部世界, 滋生了对真理的教条式主张。Rorty去世后出版的《反威权主义的务实主义》(2021), 描绘了从专业地理学到公众地理学的转变(尽管Rorty从未使用过这个词), 这种转变能够摆脱威权主义确信。为了实现这种转变, 需要从分析转向对话, 从抽象的理论化转向尽可能地扩大确信的公众性, 从表达前件真理转向务实主义的共识。Rorty的反威权务实主义有力地说明, 我们应当停止把知识作为对答案已知的选择题的正确回答, 转而培育公众地理学, 应对更大的挑战——达成如何共存于这个相互依存的世界的共识。

La mayoría de las prácticas de la geografía profesional utilizan una ontología realista del conocimiento, buscando representaciones fidedignas de un mundo exterior que existe en sí mismo, con anterioridad a nuestros intentos por conocerlo. La certidumbre en la exactitud de nuestras representaciones interiores del mundo exterior, sin embargo, engendra reclamos dogmáticos sobre la verdad en la intención de salvar la brecha insalvable que separa la materia de la mente. Una lectura del Pragmatismo como Autoritarismo de Rorty (2021), de publicación póstuma, ofrece un escape desde la certeza autoritaria, trazando un cambio de la geografía profesional hacia una geografía pública (si bien él nunca lo expresó en estos términos). Haciendo esto, implica pasar del análisis a la conversación; de la teorización abstracta a la extensión de la lealtad a la pluralidad mayor posible de lo público; y de representar una verdad antecedente al objetivo del pragmático de lograr un acuerdo colectivo sobre lo que habría de hacerse. El pragmatismo autoritario de Rorty logra un caso convincente sobre dejar de pensar el conocimiento como como la manera correcta de responder una pregunta de múltiples opciones, en la que la respuesta se conoce de antemano y, en su lugar, nutrir una geografía pública orientada hacia el desafío mayor de negociar un acuerdo colectivo sobre cómo convivir en un mundo interdependiente.

Key Words:

• certainty
• knowledge
• plurality
• pragmatism
• publicity

关键词:

• 确信
• 知识
• 多元性
• 务实主义
• 公众性

Palabras clave:

• certidumbre
• conocimiento
• pluralidad
• pragmatismo
• publicidad

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

I thank Priti Narayan and Emily Rosenman for organizing this Focus section and for generously including me in the discussion. Bob Beauregard, Carol Corden, Kathe Newman, Tamar Rothenberg, and Jane Wills provided extremely helpful comments on previous drafts.

Notes

1 The Cartesian dualism of mind and matter informing a realist ontology reflecting “the crucial distinction and radical difference between thought objects and real objects” (Sayer 1992, 71) was disparaged by the pragmatist philosopher Dewey ([1929] 1988) as the spectator theory of knowledge relying on an unverifiable correspondence theory of truth (Putnam 1998; Lake 2014, 2017).

2 I use the term professional geography to designate the practice of geographic inquiry aligned with generally accepted disciplinary norms of conceptual and methodological rigor as taught in most methods classes and as widely exemplified in the pages of The Professional Geographer (cf. De Dijn 2015).

3 See https://www.ets.org/gre/test-takers/general-test/prepare/content/quantitative-reasoning.html.

4 In the algebraic example offered in the GRE test guide, the assertion that “the answer is there” relies on a set of prior agreements including a number system, a set of integers, and axioms of commutativity, identity, transitivity, and so on, developed through the long social history of mathematics (cf. Stillwell 2004; Beck and Geoghegan 2010). Agreement on these axiomatic assumptions exemplifies Rorty’s (1979) contention that “when we have justified true belief … we may have no more than conformity to the norms of the day” (367).

5 Pragmatism’s antirepresentational rejection of the correspondence theory of truth differs in important respects from the idealist/subjectivist orientation of much recent nonrepresentational theory (cf. Thrift 2008; Massumi 2015) that paradoxically foregrounds the representation of subjective states.

6 This, of course, is not to argue that a single truth prevails in a discipline at a given time, as alternative paradigms are introduced, vie for prominence, mature, and are displaced by ever newer, emergent vocabularies and formulations (Kuhn 1970).

7 According to a popular business management Web site, for example, “As we go up the levels of abstraction, ideas increase and reality recedes.” See ChangingMinds.org at http://changingminds.org/disciplines/communication/comms_theory/level_abstraction.htm. Rorty’s perspective on the horizontal relation among affected inquirers bears striking resemblances to, but reaches beyond, representations of flat ontologies (Jones, Woodward, and Marston 2007; Ash 2020), assemblage theory (Anderson and McFarlane 2011; Farias 2011; McFarland 2011), and actor-network theory (Latour 2007; Marres 2020). Rorty’s concept of horizontality defines a relation among actors creating their world while the latter approaches theorize horizontality as the armature of their representations of an external world. At stake, for Rorty, is honing our practices of relating rather than refining our representations of those relations.

8 Conventional microeconomic theory labels as externalities the indirect effects of market processes on social well-being, deceptively truncating the inescapable interdependencies recognized in Rorty’s (2021, 84–103) encompassing concept of pan-relationalism, in which the network of relations has no outside. In Dewey’s ([1927] 2008) words, “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (48).

9 Examples include the Public Science Project (http://publicscienceproject.org/about/) and the Community Geographies Collaborative within the American Association of Geographers (https://cgcollaborative.org/community-geography-directory-of-centers/).

10 Dewey ([1920] 2008) described the plurality of expertise by remarking that “the shoemaker is a judge of a good pair of shoes, but he is no judge at all of the more important question whether and when it is good to wear shoes” (88). He repeated the metaphor seven years later (Dewey [1927] 2008) in observing that “the man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied” (364).

11 The representational practice prevailing in professional economic geography is illustrated by a recent annual volume of a top-tier journal (Economic Geography, vol. 98, 2022), which published articles representing, inter alia, the urban rank-size hierarchy, the geography of business services, variations in regional development policy, the spatial structure of technology networks, the global distribution of chip production, the practice of firm relocations, patterns of regional economic diversification, and the characteristics of labor in global production networks.

12 Rorty (2021) was consistently antiauthoritarian about his own antiauthoritarianism. “It would be inconsistent with my own pan-relationalism,” he said, “to try to convince you that the … pragmatist way of thinking of truth … is the objectively true way. All I am entitled to say is that it is a useful way, useful for certain particular purposes” (100).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert W. Lake

ROBERT W. LAKE is Professor Emeritus in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include community-engaged planning, the financialization of public policy, and pragmatist approaches to knowledge production and social inquiry.