Postpositivism

Positivism and Its Critics

Positivism is a position in the philosophy of science that emphasizes the importance of observation for the growth of knowledge and thus considers the measurement of phenomena as central to the development of understanding. In its more sophisticated characterizations, however, it recognizes the need for a theoretical framework within which to structure data. Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, argued that theories should be tested against data with the intention of their falsification and subsequent replacement with improved theoretical models. In this way, science would contribute a closer and closer approximation to the truth of how phenomena work and the causal relations between these phenomena. Positivism has been widely applied in the natural sciences, where empirical observation is used to generate theories and models that can be generalized. This approach rejects nonobservable (and hence untestable) sources of knowledge as unscientific.

Positivism can be criticized for ruling out various sources of understanding of the world including those deriving from human experiences, reasoning, or interpretation as inappropriate for scientific enquiry. In the social sciences, these sources of understanding (e.g., qualitative interview data) are of great importance as bases for the growth of knowledge, and many areas of social scientific enquiry would be impoverished without recourse to such sources because this interpretative work is itself the subject of interest. A second criticism is that positivism ignores context and attempts to establish generalities independent of setting. In social science, setting is often an integral component of activity and as such, cannot be discounted—indeed, claims to knowledge require full contextualization. A third criticism is that as social order emerges from the sense making of human beings it will be largely contingent upon value-perspectives, and it is problematic to describe a single truth concerning the nature of the social world. Finally, positivism is committed to removing subjectivity from knowledge growth and thus denies any role for reflexivity among researchers.

For these reasons, positivism has been widely criticized since the inception of social science and has been largely replaced with postpositivist epistemologies (theories of knowledge) and ontologies (theories of the nature of reality), particularly in qualitative research. For postpositivists, while the pursuit of knowledge remains an aim of social scientific enquiry, the concept of an absolute truth may be seen as an aspiration rather than as something that can be discovered once and for all. Understanding rather than explanation is sometimes regarded as the objective of postpositivist enquiry, and this objective is often further constrained by acknowledgments of context and contingency. Furthermore, in postpositivism the role of the researcher as interpreter of data is fully acknowledged, as is the importance of reflexivity in research practice.

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