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| PROBLEM-DOMINATED VERSUS METHOD-DOMINATED? THE REFLECTION ON THE METHODLOGY OF HUMAN |
| TANG Mao-lin |
| School of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China |
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Abstract 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.
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Received: 26 July 2012
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2013, Vol. 28 
