Remarks on the term “environment”

The term environment has been used in various and inconsistent ways by scientists from many disciplines and can frequently be regarded as an empty formula. The author argues that this term has an ascertained meaning only within the concept of ecology. Therefore, any attempt to use the relative term environment in an absolute way and apart from this context must necessarily lead to its hypostatization, giving it the character of an entity of its own. The different aspects of the ecology concept — here called dimensions — should rather be defined according to the specific approaches of particular empirical studies. The paper briefly discusses the meaning of those dimensions which are interrelated and form a multidimensional space. Depending on the position of a particular approach within this multidimensional concept, a specific, ontologically neutral definition of environment may be developed, whose meaning (in accordance with the scale of reflections) can now be specified.This text is the enlarged and altered version of a lecture given on 1979-08-27 at the Third Vienna International Meeting on Human Ecology (Vienna, 1979-08-27–1979-08-31).