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Postpositivism
A broad cluster of beliefs about research methods in the social and behavioral sciences. Postpositivism is most clearly defined by what it rejects or modifies—positivism. Positivism is an epistemological belief. Epistemology is the study of knowledge: what it is and how we obtain it. The most influential positivists were members of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s. They believed that knowledge can only be obtained scientifically. Furthermore, if something cannot be studied scientifically, then trying to study it in other ways is meaningless. The positivist definition of “scientific” was narrow and mandated the empirical verification of theories. Logical positivism added to this the contention that it is also possible to obtain positive knowledge through rigorous deduction based on the model of mathematics.
Postpositivism is sometimes ...