Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Replication and the search for the laws in the geographic sciences
Published in Annals of GIS, 2022
Peter Kedron, Joseph Holler
A scientific law is a synthetic statement that describes how some phenomenon will behave under a set of conditions. Laws describe regular associations, modes of behaviour, or patterns that are relatively stable and apply to all the phenomena they describe (Castree 2005). Laws have three key features that distinguish them from other forms of synthetic statements and set criteria for their identification and assessment. Laws must be (1) general statements about factual truths, (2) empirically supported, and (3) integrated into theory (Braithwaite 1960; Hemple 1965; Golledge and Amedeo 1968; Harvey 1969).