ABSTRACT

Geomorphology at the close of the twentieth century appears still to be dominated by the philosophy of positivism. ‘All participants (in the Frankfurt meeting of the International Association of Geomorphologists) are quite clearly working within a single paradigm which derives fundamentally from the European scientific tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (Kennedy 1990). At the same time, geomorphologists are tackling an increasingly wide range of problems and, without a central unifying concept, ‘we are in a divergent phase of high plurality’ (Barsch 1990). These observations, made at the same scientific event, imply that the unity of the positivist position may be worthy of closer examination.