从段义孚在《人文主义地理学》发表之前的作品来看,他对于人的环境经验研究有如下基本观点:1反对生硬的量化记录,推崇基于丰富的感知觉的直接描述式地理学论文写作;2反对用偏狭的意象与心智地图来阐释人类的环境认知,推崇能够将环境认知的过程与结果相结合的"基模";3反对孤立地认识和使用"环境"概念,推崇富有人文精神且能够将环境概念容纳于其中的"世界"概念。对段义孚而言,现象学主要是一种哲学立场,而不是需要从形式上去模仿、从术语上去标示甚至被某些"定论"所绑缚的一种操作指南,因此,与其说他的作品中运用了某种严格的"现象学方法",不如说他的工作体现出一种方法论层面的"现象学态度"。

In the historical works of geographical thoughts, a general judgment about humanistic geographers such as Tuan Yi-Fu is that they were profoundly impacted by phenomenology and existentialism. However, in Tuan's Humanistic Geography, there were few clues of such impact from those two philosophical schools. This study collects and analyses Tuan's main works before the publication of Humanistic Geography and summaries his three viewpoints about the researches on human's environmental experience:①he opposes the rigid, quantitative recording in geographical papers, whilst supports the direct, descriptive writing that relies on abundant perception; ② he opposes to interpret human's environmental cogitation with limited models such as image and mind maps, whilst supports the model of schemata that is able to combine the environmental cogitation's processes and outcomes; ③he opposes to regard and use the concept of "environment" in an isolated way, whilst supports the humanist term of "world" that is able to contain the concept of environment within. It is obviously that, his "humanism" is not only a much more radical empiricism, i.e. to emphasize the direct and lived experience of human whilst to refuse the specious "scientific experience" that has been reconstructed by various scientific conceptualization, but also a recognition that this direct and lived experience should be identified as individual, complex, and emergent, and also a call on human geographers to be always methodologically alert to the impulse of oversimplification and systematic construction of human experience from scientific positivism. Therefore, it argues that, to Tuan Yi-Fu, phenomenology is rather a philosophical standpoint than an operational guide or an analytical tool that should be imitated in its form, expressed within its terms, or even solidified by some "final conclusion".