Um Paradigma para a geografia moderna

Abstract

The A. himself defines the article as a personal effort to identify the origin of the great confusion and many doubts about the validity in continuing the researchs as always were done in Geography formerly, indicating a way to the problem. Summarizing, as the title itself says, this article defines "a paradigm for modern Geography".

In the first place the A. shows the convergent lines of dissatisfaction which he intends are becoming traditional very quickly, and in many places is yet a new frontier of Geography: the use of statistic-quantitative methods of analysis. The first of them is the transversal analysis, static, of geographical phenomena, unable to offer a reliable indication of a variety - equally plausible - of cause and effect process, which would can produces that spatial distribution.

However, the A. believes that from this apparent lack of unity in the thought, it hides a certain unity which, when properly elucidate - as he proposes to do - it will indicate the necessity of "a substantial re-evaluation and re-formulation of partial theories". His suggestions is to direct the development of the Geography in the years, according to a conception of ",process o f metageography", that is, the understanding o f the geographical phenomena at light of the process that beget them, but at the same time, with a sense that behind them, there are a human decision (what the man think is important because determine what he does).

The theory of systems is a basic piece of this conception, and the decision taking theory is another thing. What the A. intends to say with the combination of these two things in relation to a conception of metageography, is that a person (or a group of persons who could maintain the capacity to constitute a collective) constitutes the main element of the process and that the interaction among the elements, in time and in space, are basic points in the systemic conception.

Thus the Geography may contribute on problems of social relevancy and identifying the process and the way of its evolution.