ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the manner in which American geographers and other social scientists have sought to fit regional studies within the prevailing conceptions of scientific rationality in the 20th century. The most common view of such attempts has been that they have been unsuccessful. The modern model of scientific rationality has been drawn from the physical sciences, and regional studies have not conformed to this model. This fact is an important one for understanding the history of geography in this century. The concepts of place and region have occupied an ambiguous position in the conceptual landscape of 20th-century social science. Through this century, the study of regions has moved toward the periphery of social science and beyond. The study of place and region has generally been referred to as "chorology". The chapter examines the language of the chorologists, and therefore uses the terms "place" and "region" such that, except for the differences in geographical scale, their meanings are essentially equivalent.
