Postpositivism

Postpositivism is used to refer to alternatives to the philosophy of positivism. Understood very broadly, it can mean something like “nonpositivism”—that is, any philosophy other than positivism, including, for example, critical theory, feminist philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics, interpretivism, and so on. Used in a more restricted sense, it refers to a mixture of those ideas comprising the contemporary philosophy of science, including a moderate empiricism, the hypothetico-deductive method, nonfoundationalism, and acceptance of objectivity as a regulative ideal.