Abstract

An authentic human science must ensure that its lead concepts are intersubjectively valid to the community of scientists, as well as relevant to the meanings that the agents studied assign to their actions in the lived world. A human science must therefore be rooted in an interpretation of itself that reveals the vital connection between the world of science and the lived world of man. But human geography currently faces a crisis of meaning as a human science because such an interpretation is not available. ;Positivism and humanism dominate human geography, and each splits the two worlds from one another. Positivism creates a valid, scientific geography modeled after physics, whereas humanism produces a humanly relevant geography that describes the richly textured details of the lived world. Yet neither provides an interpretation of geography as a human science, because neither reveals how the purely formal concepts of science are to be related to the concrete details of the lived world. ;The aim of this dissertation is to cut below the positivist-humanist dispute and retrieve the meaning of geography as a human science, and more particularly to reveal the meaning of one of its lead concepts--space--by means of a philosophical critique conducted from a hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective. The meaning of a human science is shown to depend upon three components: the empirical which presupposes a theoretical framework by which hypotheses can be generated and tested; the descriptive which lays out the essential structures of the theoretical framework; and the interpretative which uncovers the intersubjectively shared, publically accessible meanings that the agents studied assign to their actions. This triad of perspectives ensures that geographers' lead concepts, particularly space, can be simultaneously valid to geographers as scientists, as well as relevant to the concrete lived experiences of space of the agents studied, and thereby guarantees the authenticity of geography as a human science