The Metascientific Approaches to Montology

Abstract

This chapter aims to determine selected issues, topics, and research approaches about the nature of montology. It requires an adequate approach of individual scientific disciplines to formulate the research object, goal, and approaches and, ultimately, the authenticity and identity of montology itself. This is the task of metascientific superstructure: its epistemology as means of metamontology, as the science about montology. Its mission is to generalize the results of montological research into certain regularities and laws. In addition, the metascientific approach contributes to the definition of montology and its position and collaboration with other scientific disciplines.

We rely on experience obtained from many years of metascientific research of landscape ecology, lying at the intersection of geography and ecology. Thus, it was possible to build a consistent foundation of meta-landscape ecology as a new ecological discipline. We have selected important metascientific aspects of landscape ecology with its intra-, inter-, and transdisciplinary approaches. The generalized statement of knowledge and experience of meta-landscape ecological research, tested on the example of several scientific disciplines, allows us to apply them to outline future developments of montology. The understandings of montology are not isolated but interconnected by the flow of information and knowledge about its entities, structures, and principles, thus creating a certain system. For a deeper metascientific understanding of the concept and nature of montology, it is necessary to know its scientific-structural, content-conceptual, and scale-conceptual development. The current palimpsest of the mountainscape and montology is the result of overlapping and reflection of structures and features of the temporal-spatial layers of genetic, functional, and physiognomic development. The development of mountain research and montology represents, from a metascientific point of view, interconnected study issues. In this way, the mountainscape can currently be understood as a holistic and complex system research object. Its concepts are fluctuating due to the relatively young age, complexity, and wide range of research issues, topics, approaches, and scientists. From the metascientific point of view, the nature of the research approach of montology can be considered as a mixed intra-, inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary.