我国人文地理学研究存在明显的政策导向和方法(技术)导向。这种特色的成因是复杂的。政策导向主要与经世致用、缺乏研究传统和批判性思维有关;方法(技术)导向则主要与理工科思维、现代化的简单理解和对工具理性的推崇,以及计算机软件的普及以及"3S"技术发展有关。在新形势下,我国人文地理学研究要实现知识增量,就必须以问题和理论为导向,进而看我们能否发现新的现象和问题,验证其是否普遍存在,然后寻找理论解释(已有理论或建立新理论)。这种对我国人文地理理想图景的探讨值得重视。

The social science research in mainland China is obviously policy-oriented, and this tradition has a long history. The main purpose of the researches is to verify the validity of the policies by the national and local authorities. As a part of social science, human geography research in mainland China has almost the same policy-oriented. It is also becoming more and more obvious that there emerges a trend of method-oriented in the researches. The policy-oriented and method-oriented of Chinese human geography studies can be explained by several factors, including pragmatism, lack or lost of our research tradition, critical thinking not so popular because of traditional Chinese culture, the dominant thinking of science and technology, the oversimple understanding of modernization, the highly praised of instrumental rationality, and the progress of statistical software and remote sensing and geographical information system. Based on such transformation towards ambitious prospect of human geography studies in China, let us do our best to see whether we can thus find new geographical problems or phenomena, validate their ubiquity and search theoretical explanations(old or new ones). We should remember that all methods and techniques are the tools to solve our academic or practical problems. According to Jürgen Habermas human sciences can be divided into three broad categories, empirical-analytic sciences, historical-hermeneutic sciences and critical sciences. As to our human geographical studies little attention has been paid to the critical sciences and the attention been paid to the historical-hermeneutic sciences are limited.