TRINITARIAN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE SUBJECT OF RESEARCH IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Abstract

The article uses inductive and deductive approaches to justify the trinitarian approach to understanding the subject of research in human geography. In the framework of the inductive approach the feasibility and the features of formulation of this subject for a sample of thirty candidate dissertations on the speciality “Economic and Social Geography” are studied. The substantive conclusions about the actual non-unitary nature of the research subject in the dissertations and the need to improve its wording have been made. Proposed trinitarian understanding of the subject of study of social geography, as the unity of the three components: the geospheric interdependence of terrestrial phenomena, geospatial variability of social phenomena and the geotorial organization of society. These components generally correspond to the points of the subject of research in specific human-geographical works and generalize them. Each of the components of the subject of research has been characterized and their content is disclosed. The first component is the study of natural and social prerequisites and factors of the investigated object, its factor and resultant features, the essential laws and regularities of deterministic or statistical interrelationships between the investigated features at each point of the geospatial. The second component is the study of the spatial characteristics of the propagation of the phenomena studied, the study of the features of the phenomena under study in different places of the geospatial. The third component is the study of the relative positioning in the space of the earth's surface, geospatial connections and flows, territorial formations and the functioning of these entities, that is, knowledge of the geotorial organization of society includes knowledge of geopositionality, georelation, geointegration, geofunctionality. Separately, the problem of the functional aspect in social geography is considered and the conclusion about its necessary presence in all three components of the trinitary subject of research is made. In the framework of the deductive approach, three cognitive dichotomies are proposed and considered: knowledge of the phenomenon – knowledge of the essence, extra-spatial cognition – spatial cognition, qualitative knowledge – quantitative cognition. The close connection between the components of the trinitarian approach with combinations of alternatives to cognitive dichotomies and the patterns of such a connection are shown. An appropriate classification of laws and regularities of human geography is proposed based on the Trinitarian approach to understanding the subject of its research. The proposed structure of mathematical social geography, which corresponds to the trinitarian understanding of the subject of research, and the corresponding mathematical-geographical models are determined. In the framework of the second block of, the classifications of centrography methods are proposed.