Epistemology of Postmodern Cartographic Research and Engineering of Scientific Knowledge Building

Abstract

The new technologies revolution has driven an epistemological rupture between modern and postmodern cartographic research. It has fertilized a new engineering of construction postmodern cartographic knowledge based on a fivefold epistemological foundation: naturalist (descriptive epistemology), normative (prescriptive epistemology), operational (experimental epistemology), critical (radical epistemology) and activist (Militant epistemology). In practice, postmodern cartographic research is implemented from the paradigm of epistemological syncretism with four postures: constructivist (qualitative variable), post-positivist (quantitative variable), systemist (quantitative and qualitative variables) and interventionist (quantitative and/or qualitative variable). The epistemological positioning here consists in adopting one of these postures and implementing its specific methodological approach. The present study thus attempts to level the deficit of epistemological framing of postmodern cartographic research, which innovates with criticality, radicality and activist-commitment, while perpetuating axiological neutrality and methodological rigor. These innovations thus seal the break with the neutrality or knurling of university activism in the modern era. In other words, cartographic postmodernism opens a new era of academic activism for radical change.