General Science

Is Geography a Natural Science or Social Science?

Is Geography a Natural Science or Social Science?

Geography, whose name comes from the Greek term geographia, which meaning “description of the earth,” has long been regarded as one of the core topics in the educational system. a topic that is exceptional in that it connects the global social and physical components.

It is common knowledge that young princes, including Alexander of Greece and Ashoka of India, were taught geography. One of the most crucial topics that a learned person—and more significantly, a future king—should be familiar with. Understanding geography was regarded as essential to success and survival.

Returning to the Present – 2013! We observe the widespread use of GIS and location-based apps.

The electrical department in India actively uses GIS to monitor its infrastructure and assist with maintenance. To manage their resources and support the upkeep of Law and Order, the police in the nation are currently purchasing vehicles with GPS attached. These are merely examples of “Geography” in use.

Only a thousand or more graduates in geography and geoinformation are produced annually by universities in a nation with a population of more than a billion. Globally, the private sector has a huge need for people resources who have a strong understanding of geographic sciences. The value of integrating geography into the core of education is slowly becoming understood by all nations. The National Task Force on Geospatial Education, a report by the Indian Planning Commission, discusses how to help the nation become more geographically conscious.

Natural science: On the basis of actual data from observation and experimentation, natural science is one of the disciplines of knowledge that deals with the description, comprehension, and prediction of natural events. The validity of scientific advancements is attempted to be ensured through mechanisms like peer review and reproducibility of results.

Physical science and life science are the two main areas of natural science. Biology is another name for life science, and the fields of physical science are physics, chemistry, earth science, and astronomy. These areas of natural science could be separated even further into more specific disciplines (also known as fields). As formal sciences, mathematics and logic are used by natural sciences to translate observations of nature into measures that may be explained as unambiguous declarations of “laws of nature.”

More traditional schools of natural philosophy, which can be linked to Taoist traditions in Asia and ancient Greece in the West, were supplanted by modern science. Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and Newton methodically argued the advantages of utilizing more mathematical and experimental methodologies. Natural science still requires philosophical viewpoints, hypotheses, and presuppositions notwithstanding how frequently they are disregarded. Natural history, which appeared in the 16th century and described and classified plants, animals, minerals, and other objects, was replaced by systematic data collecting, including discovery science. Today, the term “natural history” conjures up observational narratives geared toward mass audiences.

Social science: One of the scientific disciplines, social science is concerned with examining how societies function and how people interact within them. The original “science of society,” sociology, which was founded in the 19th century, was referred to by the phrase in the past. It now includes a broad range of academic disciplines in addition to sociology, such as anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, management science, communication science, political science, and psychology.

Positivist social scientists define science in its stricter modern sense by using techniques similar to those used in the scientific sciences as instruments for understanding society. Contrarily, interpretivist social scientists approach science in a larger sense by using social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than developing empirically falsifiable theories. In contemporary academic practice, researchers frequently use a variety of approaches (for instance, combining both quantitative and qualitative research). As practitioners from many fields share the same objectives and procedures, the phrase “social research” has also come to have some autonomy.