Oleksa Kovalyov
Wholeness would measure
all points as one point - no separation means no measurement.
When there is no measurement, there is the quality of wholeness
J.
Krishnamurti
Introduction
In this short speech, I touch on the important and complex issue of the integrity of the entities studied by geographers and the integrity of geography itself as a scientific branch. What is science in general? This is a special form of human communities, a special approach to vision, reflection of the world, which is based on the mental ordering of the perceived by introducing concepts and relationships between them in order to achieve maximum correlation with observations if unmatched. The task of science is to organize empirical data. An important aspect of science is the formulation of theories that aim to reduce the identified links to a single principle, but no theory, like all of them together, can provide absolute truth (any theory is correct only in a limited context), therefore, their sequence is iterative. Therefore, what we call knowledge is always relative. Each scientific field conducts its own features of research, highlighting its area of interest in the surrounding world, but the main principles remain unchanged. The formation of each scientific discipline includes periods of domination of certain views (schools) based on stereotypes, and periods of significant change, when the foreground is the departure from old stereotypes and the transition to new ones, which takes some time during which new views are approved and are distributed. This is difficult because holders of old stereotypes tend to hold higher positions and have a higher formal rating, which allows them to block the spread of new ideas. Old views become dogmas, their provisions are introduced into regulations as absolute truth, which is very difficult to resist. This is also the case in geography. But it is never possible to stop, because scientific thought is an uninterrupted flow, which can be both calm and turbulent, the jets can diverge and converge - without discussion ( and based on stereotypes is a sign of limitation ). This is especially important for geography, because geographers still have not been able to define clearly the field of study of this scientific discipline. And the problem is the extreme complexity of the issue. This is clear from the statement of P. Bowler: « Geography is a classic example of a subject that can disappear as a separate entity, each of its functions siphoned off by a new specialization. Much of what is called 'physical geology' could be dealt with quite happily by geomorphologists, geologists, climatologists and others. The exploration of humankind's relationship to the physical world could be taken up by anthropologists and various branches of the social and economic sciences. In the United States geography has indeed almost disappeared as a distinct academic discipline » [Bowler, 1992: 391]. My aim is to show that this is not so, because geography has its original field of study, which cannot be claimed by other scientific fields, which, on the contrary, determines its integrity, because the field of its study is integral. In this regard, the questions posed by R. Inkpen regarding physical geography are interesting (I have my own point of view in this direction, so I remove the word "physical") [Inkpen, 2003: іх]:
