Philosophy of Science

Post-Positivism

Post-positivism is best understood by comparing it with positivism, which was the dominant paradigm in the sciences through much of the twentieth century. Inherent in positivist thought is the assumption that there is a knowable real world independent of human observation. As such, positivism is a foundational epistemology. That is, it seeks to base all knowledge claims ultimately on unquestionable facts. These facts can be either logical or empirical in nature. While facts based on logical arguments may at first seem attractive, even the most carefully argued logical system is open to challenge in several ways. For example, although the facts of Euclidean geometry are based on intuitive axioms that appear to be reasonable and unquestionable, it turns out that other highly logical and reasonable geometrical systems can be developed from different axioms. In addition, Kurt Gödel, in his incompleteness theorem, demonstrated that any one logical system fails at some point because it can generate new ideas that go beyond the realm of that system. Possibly, most important is the fact that what may seem reasonable to some people may not seem so to others.

To positivists, the foundation of scientific knowledge can also be empirical. According to this view, scientific knowledge is derived only from observations of the natural world that can be measured in some way. As it turns out, there are practical and theoretical reasons why this is not possible. First, it has been demonstrated that perception is theory-laden. Humans observe the world through the lenses of how they already understand the world. For example, as Donna Haraway has pointed out, after women entered the field of primatology, they saw co-operation and kinship in primate behaviours where male primatologists had seen conflict. Second, the development of truth statements from observations can only be done through induction. However, it has been shown that induction can be fallible. Simply put, what has been is not always what will be. A simple example of this is that until Europeans saw black swans in Australia, they believed, based on their observations of swans in Europe and North America, that all swans were white. What this shows is that it cannot be proven to be true from the countless observations of only white swans—in other words, through induction—that swans are always white. Tied to the problem with induction is that multiple theories can be used to explain any set of observations. This fallibility of induction is what led Karl Popper to reject the idea that hypotheses can be proved and instead to argue that researchers ought to seek ways to disprove their theories. Third, scientific knowledge is a web-like structure of many beliefs. A belief that is shown to be untrue empirically can be modified by adjusting other beliefs and, therefore, retained. This aspect of science is an integral part of what Thomas Kuhn has called ‘normal science’, which is done within paradigms. While there are times when new evidence causes the rejection of an existing paradigm and leads to the acceptance of a new one (e.g. the move from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the solar system), it is more common to find ways to adjust the existing network of scientific beliefs than to jettison it. This is similar to Jean Piaget's notion of assimilation. Finally, science, like any other human activity, is social. Individual scientists do not have their own paradigms; paradigms are part of the beliefs of a community of scientists. It is that community that decides through formal and informal epistemic authorities, such as journal review boards, whether the research findings ought to be accepted as scientific knowledge. In addition, it has been shown in numerous sociological studies that the practice of science is affected by political and economic factors, as well as gender and ethnicity. D. C. Phillips and Nicholas Burbules in their book Postpositivism and Educational Research (2000) provide a thorough discussion of the problematic nature of the foundational epistemologies discussed above.

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